Požela: malicious violators of traffic rules could be subject to a limited period of imprisonment

“We can see that outside Lithuania, other neighboring countries, which also enjoy fairly good emergency indicators, already started to signal last year that the situation is changing. And from that decline comes stabilization, in a bad sense, or the growth of accidents. This process came to Lithuania in the first months with an increase in the number of people killed on the road. And there is always a certain cycle when the legal environment expires, the implemented traffic safety measures expire,” R. Požėla told LRT television on Thursday.

“And I think that in our case too, these measures have expired. And we see the need for additional emphasis against malicious offenders who actually completely ignore generally accepted norms, who do not enforce penalties and do not pay fines,” he added.

According to the Commissioner-General, the fixed term of imprisonment, which was previously applied, would be an effective measure even against malicious offenders. In his opinion, such imprisonment could last for several months.

“One of our proposals would be a time-limited loss of liberty, perhaps an analogue, as was previously the case in the Code of Administrative Law Violations, of a certain restriction of liberty, which is called administrative arrest.
And which, in our opinion, was really an effective tool even for those malicious offenders,” the commissioner asserted.

“It would probably be silly to talk about a year or something, it should probably be a matter of months,” he added.