Following the recent ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union the Ministry of the Interior has provided some clarifications through the Circular no. 6394 of 14/10/2021.
The ruling on tachograph regulations
The ruling addressed the possibility of sanctioning violations of the tachograph regulations committed in the territory of a State different from that of the contestation.
The circular: the conditions on the data of the digital tachograph memory
The document establishes that the contestations of violations of art. 142 CdS, verified through the examination of the data stored in the memory of the digital tachograph, must comply with the following CONDITIONS:
- They must be limited to those for which the verifying authority has certainty that they were committed in Italian territory.
- If based on data regarding the “instantaneous speed”: the information, in order to be usable for sanctioning purposes, must be acquired through an external reading device.
- If based on the data related to the anomalies of “speeding“: they can also be acquired through the reading of the simple tachograph prints of the registration sheets.
- Violations of the speed limits “local” can only be contested if there is a direct confirmation from the verifying authority, so that the location of the violation is identified with certainty.
- The violations referred to in paragraph 11 of Article 142 of the Highway Code (which punishes driving at a speed higher than that of the limiter), can also be contested through the mere reading of the data related to exceeding the values set on the limiter.
- Any sanction under Article 142 paragraph 11 will preclude the contestation of any violation of the “local” speed limits.
- The results obtained through indirect verification by reading the tachographic data must be corrected in favor of the offender by calculating a tolerance of 6 Km/h.
In light of the aforementioned ruling of the CJEU, we can only await further developments that will arise in this matter.