Motorists caught on camera committing a parking offence can no longer try to escape punishment by challenging the legality of such evidence, following recent amendments to the traffic regulations.

A legal notice published recently by the Transport Ministry lays down that  “photographs, film, video recordings, electronic images or any other record produced by a prescribed parking monitoring device shall be admissible in evidence and shall constitute proof of their contents”.

A Transport Malta spokesman told the Times of Malta that Motor Vehicles Regulations had been amended to bring the law in line with advances in digital technology and digital data transfer.

“The changes are mostly technical, to avoid potential loopholes,” he added, noting that the amendments would reduce the possibility of the legality of video evidence being challenged in court.

Although photo and video evidence has been used against parking offenders in the past, its admissibility was not explicitly cited in the law, making it a legal grey area. 

Read: Illegal parking left off list of penalty point offences

The spokesman noted that the amendments were enacted in consultation with the Local Enforcement System Agency and the Justice Ministry.

Changes are mostly technical

The legal notice specifies that its provisions apply to “parking monitoring devices” as prescribed by order of the Transport Minister, who may in any such order lay down conditions as to the purposes for which the device is to be used.

Furthermore, in the eyes of the law, liability will rest with the owner of the vehicle unless proven otherwise.

In the latter case, the same legal notice (LN48 of 2019) says that the owner shall be held responsible “unless the driver of the vehicle when the offence was committed is shown to have been stopped and identified by a police officer or a community officer upon or immediately after the commission of the offence”.