HW Legal
Since 1 July 2006, the Czech Republic has had a penalty points system for drivers, which keeps track of the traffic offences and crimes that drivers commit. When a driver does one of these, points are added to their record, in an amount set separately for each type of offence. So while some offences carry no points at all, the most serious conduct can add as many as 7 points. That is already half of the 12 points which, once reached, mean that a driver who stays passive automatically loses their right to drive.
Points are recorded in the drivers' register (the driver's points record, or driver's record card), where they are entered by the municipal authority with extended powers for the area where the driver lives. The authority enters the points on the basis of a final and binding decision on an offence or a crime that has been delivered to it. That decision might be a notice from the Czech Police or the municipal police about a fine imposed by an on-the-spot order, a decision imposing an administrative penalty for an offence, or even a court judgment. So the points are not entered by the Czech Police, nor by the administrative authority that imposed the penalty in the offence proceedings.
A driver's first line of defence (besides driving by the rules in the first place) should therefore be aimed at these individual decisions on which the points entries are based. In a significant number of cases, a driver is found guilty of an offence by an administrative authority on the basis of weak and inconclusive evidence, which is why our advice is not to stay passive but to defend your rights in these individual proceedings too. After all, without a final and binding decision imposing a penalty, no points can be entered on the driver's record card in the first place.
Reaching 12 points
Once the municipal authority with extended powers discovers from the drivers' register that the most recent entry has taken a driver to 12 or more points, it sends the driver a notice that they have reached 12 points, together with a request to surrender their driving licence. Under that request, the driver has 5 working days to hand in the licence to the relevant authority (during office hours).
If the driver does not hand in the licence within this period, then once it expires they lose their right to drive automatically, for one year. There is no way to shorten this period.
Failing to hand in the licence is itself an offence, punishable by a fine of between 2,500 and 5,000 CZK. If the driver then gets behind the wheel again in this situation, they risk a fine of between 25,000 and 50,000 CZK, a driving ban of one to two years, and another 4 points on their record.
Fighting the loss of your licence
A driver can fight the loss of their licence by lodging objections against the individual entries in the drivers' register. Specifically, against the entries the authority made on the basis of individual decisions imposing penalties, or decisions imposing on-the-spot fines. The objections have to be lodged within the same period as the one for surrendering the licence, that is within 5 days of receiving the notice that you have reached 12 points and the request to hand in your licence. Once the objections are lodged in time, you do not have to surrender the licence; the deadline for handing it in is suspended until the objections have been dealt with. It is worth noting that the one-year period of losing your right to drive also only starts to run once the objections have been resolved.
Before lodging objections, you need to obtain an extract from your driver's record card. You can get this at public administration contact points (Czech POINT) or at the municipal authority with extended powers. It is usually dealt with while you wait, for a small administrative fee. The extract then shows when and what offences the driver committed, and on the basis of what document the points for those offences were entered in the register.
The objections themselves will differ depending on the individual points entries, or rather on the documents they were based on. For points entries made on the basis of a Czech Police notice about an on-the-spot fine, you can challenge defects in the particular fine slip, namely that the document does not have the required particulars to serve as a basis for an entry on the driver's record card. In particular, you can point to the absence of the driver's signature, or to inadequate factual findings about the offence, such as the time and place where it was supposedly committed and the description of the conduct itself, all of which can raise doubts about whether the offence happened at all, and whether it was the driver who committed it.
As for the second most common basis for entering points, a decision of an administrative authority imposing a penalty, the objections should point to the lack of credibility and conclusiveness of the evidence on which the authority concluded that the driver had committed the offence. For these entries it is a good idea to also obtain the content of the administrative file itself, by inspecting it, which the driver is entitled to do as a party to the proceedings. Once you are familiar with the file, you can frame the objections more precisely, so that the driver can point to other possible versions of the key events that were not disproved by the evidence.
How to get your licence back after running out of points
A driver loses their right to drive for one year, but can start getting ready to win it back while that year is still running. The traffic psychology assessment (the psychological tests) can be taken at any point during the one-year ban, while the medical examination with your GP is best scheduled for the end of that period (on the day you submit your application, the report must be no more than 90 days old). Before the period ends, it is also worth choosing a driving school that provides the retest for all the categories the driver originally held, and booking a date there. The competence test itself (the final test and the practical drives) may only lawfully be taken once the one-year period since losing the right to drive has passed.
The driver then submits the documents proving their professional competence, their medical fitness, and the result of the traffic psychology assessment to the municipal authority with extended powers, together with an application to have their right to drive returned.