The Constitutional Council has ruled: speed controls are not part of the operations of the police, the reporting of which is now prohibited on applications such as Coyote and Waze.
A decree entered into force on 1er last November, not yet applied (read below), prohibits the reporting of certain road checks by the police via driving assistance and navigation applications such as Coyote or Waze. Coyote System had lodged an appeal on this matter with the Council of State, which handed over to the Constitutional Council on this issue. The French company considered that this ban violated freedom of expression as well as that of entrepreneurship and equality before the law, arguing on this point its domicile in France against competitors based abroad. . The Constitutional Council has just rejected Coyote on these last two grievances, but to confirm in passing that radar reports were not affected by this ban.
Speed controls excluded from prohibitions
The ban on reporting applies to certain clearly defined roadside checks, involving the interception of vehicles. These include blood alcohol or drug tests, but also the search for individuals. for criminal or terrorist acts, for example, with a time limit set at two hours in the first case and twelve hours in the second. The perimeter of the routes concerned is limited to 2 km in built-up areas and 10 km outside built-up areas. According to the Constitutional Council, these provisions “ violate freedom of expression and communication “. Gold ” any interference with the exercise of this freedom must be necessary, appropriate and proportionate to the objective pursued “, And Road Safety pointed out last spring that” the reporting of these controls allows[tait] to achieve the desired result, namely to slow down the drivers “. An argument that the Sages take up for themselves. ” This prohibition only applies to those restrictively enumerated controls, which do not include speed controls. », They explain.
The theory clarified, but what about the practice?
Radars can still be reported by Coyote, Waze and others, but the question of the practical application of the decree with respect to other checks does not seem to be resolved yet. It is all the more complex since these are participatory applications, the information being transmitted by the users to then be displayed to all the users. At the beginning of last November, our colleagues from Parisian reported that the IT resources of the Ministry of the Interior relating to the application of these bans were not yet operational.
TO READ. Radar section. A more efficient device in preparation
