The Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (Aarto) Act – to be rolled out in June – will presume motorists guilty until they prove themselves innocent and therefore take away the constitutional rights of motorists.

The Mercury reports this is according to Howard Dembovsky and his legal team from De Klerk and Marais Incorporated, who have appealed to South Africans to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ because this was wrong.

Dembovsky said he did not have a problem with the points demerit system being introduced as part of the country’s legislation because SA should have had it many years ago. But it was the idea that motorists would be presumed guilty of infringements until proven innocent that bothered him, he said.

This, he explained, was unconstitutional in the sense that the Constitution presumed people to be innocent until proven guilty, but the Act was going to presume vice versa in the case of motorists.

Dembovsky said Aarto was basically a process of converting traffic fines to invoices and giving the government powers to say ‘pay these fines or we’ll hurt you’, but motorists could not prove their innocence.

‘How are you going to prove innocence, for example, if a traffic officer alleges that you failed to come to a stop at a stop sign? How are you going to prove in writing that you did? That’s why we have trial courts because in the trial, it is the onus of the accuser to prove the allegations, not the onus of the accused persons to prove their innocence.’

Full report in The Mercury (subscription needed)

Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences Amendment Act 4 of 2019