Finnish traffic tickets
HELSINKI, Finland — Jaako Rytsola, a 27-year-old Finnish Internet entrepreneur and newspaper columnist, was cruising in his BMW one recent evening. “The road was wide and I was feeling good,” he later wrote. “It’s nice to be driving when there’s no one in sight.”
But this road wasn’t empty; a radar-equipped police car was clocking his speed. The officer pulled over Mr. Rytsola’s car and issued him a speeding ticket for driving 43 miles an hour in a 25-mile-an-hour zone. The fine: $71,400.
The staggering sum was no mistake. In Finland, traffic fines generally are based on two factors: the severity of the offense and the driver’s income.
Read the rest: stayfreemagazine.org
via re
June 14th, 2007 at 6:50 am
This day-fine system is dependent on the police instant access of personal economic data via SMS messages. Most or all of the other European Union member states interpret the EU Data Protection directive as defining that this type of personal data is not to be used in law enforcement, nor to be fetched via mobile SMS messages. When enforcing traffic violations, police are therefore put into a situation where they are nationally discriminating - that is giving a person who resides in Finland a salary based fine, and giving a person who resides in another member state a minimum default fine for the same violation. Nevertheless, persons who reside in other EU member states can freely drive in Finland with a valid EU driver’s license. A person from another EU member state, if stopped for a traffic violation in Finland, if the police asks what his or her salary is, he or she very well has the right to say “none of your business”. That data is protected as private under the law in most of the EU countries.
The fine is also adjusted for property ownership, which can seen as a human right violation in the European Union Convention for Human Rights under the article regarding discrimination.
A person receiving this sort of speeding ticket should immediately report in a complaint it to the European Commission.
The Finland government interpretation of the Personal Data Protection directive is also under investigation in the European Commission and the EU Court. The Finnish government currently allows selling, publishing, putting in the internet, selling as mobile SMS services of personal economic data from the tax authority. This also has consequences with the day-fine system. See www.verosirkus.com for more information.