It is prohibited to place vehicles in areas occupied by green spaces.
This article exists and operates specifically in Moscow, providing for increased fines compared to fines for the same violations in the rest of Russia.
Unlike the rest of the country, in the city of Moscow, for legal entities parking a vehicle on the lawn, a fine of 300,000 rubles is imposed, for individuals - 5,000 rubles. The difference is very significant, so if the car is registered to a legal entity, then there is a danger of receiving a fine of 300,000 rubles even if the car was not actually used as part of the company’s activities (for example, it was simply in the personal use of the general director, one of the employees and etc.). The concept of lawn in the law has been replaced by the wording “territory occupied by green spaces”; the legislator made this trick due to the fact that the lawn must have certain distinctive features, and given the fact that it is located in the city, it must be on the balance sheet of the city, behind it maintenance must be carried out, etc., in other words, this gave the lawyer extra room for maneuver in order to protect his client by proving that the lawn is not a lawn at all.
Article 8.25. Placing vehicles in areas occupied by green spaces. Placing vehicles on a lawn or other area occupied by green spaces - entails the imposition of an administrative fine on citizens in the amount of five thousand rubles; for officials - thirty thousand rubles; for legal entities - three hundred thousand rubles.
Where to appeal legal. face a fine for parking on the lawn?
You can appeal the fine directly to the body that issued the controversial decision to bring the legal entity to administrative liability - to MADI. A substantiated complaint accompanied by documents as evidence must be sent to MADI by registered mail. In practice, this is a waste of time, the chances of success are approximately zero. We recommend skipping this step.
The correct decision would be to appeal the fine immediately in court! A complaint against a decision to prosecute someone for parking a car on a lawn must be sent to the court that serves the address where the violation was committed. You will find the address at which the parking was recorded in the resolution that you received from MADI, and the court is determined on the website of the Moscow City Court (on the website https://www.mos-gorsud.ru section “territorial jurisdiction”).
A few of our cancellations in the courts
Decision to cancel the fine Kuzminsky court
Decision to cancel the fine Lublin court
Decision to cancel the fine Kuntsevo court
Decision to cancel the fine Nikulinsky court
Process of proof
To cancel a decision of the State Traffic Safety Inspectorate or the Moscow Automobile Inspectorate, fairly weighty arguments are needed. Among them may be:
- Absence of an offense: the car was not parked on the lawn, there are no administrative procedural materials - protocols, resolutions.
- The driver was not the owner of the car. In this case, the court can still leave the decision on the fine in force, since responsibility for finding the car still falls on its owner.
- The car was moved onto the lawn due to an emergency, for example, in order to remove it from the roadway.
Each situation is individual and requires detailed research. The possibility of parking a car on the lawn in the yard causes controversy. The car may not interfere with pedestrians and vehicles, but the law also applies to areas inside the yard. Law enforcement officers issue protocols on bringing to justice mechanically, often without delving into the substance of the situation.
The car may be located on a piece of land that looks like a lawn. You will have to prove it based on specific facts and testimony of witnesses.
Most officials treat offenses formally, automatically finding drivers guilty. Motorists can only refer to specific facts and convince officials and the court of their innocence.
What are the deadlines for appealing a MADI decision?
The period for appealing a fine imposed on a legal entity is 10 days from the date of receipt of the decision. Please note that the deadline does NOT start from the date when the violation itself occurred (the driver parked the car on the lawn), but namely from the date when the legal entity. the person received a ruling. Decrees come from MADI by registered mail with tracking numbers; accordingly, the date of receipt of the resolution will be visible on the Russian Post website and this information can be verified very simply. A little more about the countdown of the deadline for appealing the MADI decision under Art. 8.25 Code of Administrative Offenses:
- upon receipt at the post office, 10 days are counted from the day you received the letter
- when applying in person to MADI, the period is counted from the date of personal delivery
- if the storage period for the letter at the post office has expired and it has gone back to MADI, then 10 days are calculated from the last day the letter was stored at the post office
If you find a fine for parking on the lawn in an application, on a website, etc., then we strongly do not recommend waiting for the decision by mail. Letters in the mail sometimes get lost, simply disappear without a trace, are handed to the wrong people, MADI makes a mistake in the recipient's address and a million other reasons. Explaining later in court that the letter was lost somewhere in the mail and the deadline was missed for a good reason is not the most pleasant experience and does not always end in success. Don’t risk 300,000 rubles - you urgently need to go to MADI and get a resolution on purpose!
MADI address: Moscow, st. Kalanchevskaya, 49 (metro station Komsomolskaya, 10 min walk)
If this deadline is missed, then this is of course not good and complicates the procedure, but is not an insurmountable obstacle. The period for appeal is restored in court simultaneously with the consideration of the case on the merits; in practice, Moscow courts do not interfere with the restoration of the period.
Loshakov Sergey
Leading lawyer of the bar
Sergey Valerievich is an active lawyer of the Moscow Bar Association with extensive judicial practice and extensive experience. Fill out the application in the feedback form and receive a free initial consultation with a specialist.
How to act correctly
There is a certain procedure for motorists who do not want to pay such a fine, and they do not agree with the punishment. We have already discussed the topic of challenging fines, but we need to talk about this situation separately.
Here you need to do the following:
- If this is a resolution from the traffic police, insist on recording the fact of your disagreement. Plus additionally write why you think the punishment is unfair;
- Take a few of your own photos from the scene of the proceedings. This will confirm that you are right;
- Contact the traffic police department that is responsible for the area where the incident occurred;
- Attach maximum possible evidence of innocence. These are extracts from traffic rules, photos, videos, etc.;
- Make a statement. Possible in free form. But write down all the data, circumstances, contacts, etc.;
- Submit a complaint within 10 days of receiving the notification;
- Support your complaint with a petition, a demand to cancel the fine.
Do everything to ensure that the processing time for your application is not delayed. To do this, you can send applications directly to the management of the traffic police department.
It is also advisable that the car is not seized and does not have to be taken from the impound lot.
What should I send to court and how quickly can I cancel a fine for parking on the lawn?
After the court has been determined, which, according to its territorial jurisdiction, has jurisdiction over the case, and the deadline for appeal has not been missed (if missed, an additional petition is drawn up to restore the missed deadline), the next step is to file a complaint against the decision in the case of an administrative offense under Art. 8.25 Code of Administrative Offenses of Moscow. The requirements for the complaint itself are established by the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation and there are quite a lot of them; it is impossible to briefly talk about them all. It is important to know that such a complaint can be signed either by the director of the organization, or by a representative under a power of attorney, or by a lawyer under a warrant; documents confirming authority (power of attorney) must be attached to the complaint. The period for consideration of the complaint itself in court is established by the code and is “no more than 2 months”, in other words, from the moment the court accepts the complaint, a decision can be made in a week, or maybe in 6 weeks, but not more than 2 months. While the decision to attract a legal entity for parking on the lawn is being appealed, it has no legal force, which means that it is impossible to apply any collection measures (blocking the account, writing off funds from the organization’s current account, etc.). The most important thing in a complaint is evidence. The most reliable way to change the penalty from 300,000 rubles to 5,000 rubles is to prove in court that a violation of parking rules (parking on the lawn) was committed by an individual who, for example, rented a car from an LLC (PJSC, etc.) and it should bear responsibility. A less obvious method, but used if it is impossible to follow the simple path described above, is to search for procedural violations in the process of bringing a legal entity to administrative responsibility. The Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation contains a lot of requirements for the procedure for attracting (the right to a defense, the right to participate in the consideration of a case of an administrative offense, the right to draw up a protocol on the violation in the presence of a legal entity, etc.), quite often it turns out to find a formal violation of the Code and declare the resolution illegal on these grounds.
What does an absurd fine look like?
In the presented photo, you can see a real fine under 8.25 Code of Administrative Offenses, for which a legal entity almost had to pay three hundred thousand rubles!
If you look closely, you will notice that in fact the car’s wheels are standing on the very edge of the paved area! Only its front part, the bumper, hangs over the lawn. This photo was taken in such a way that it is difficult to notice, but at the request of the court, the original was obtained in high resolution, after which all questions disappeared by themselves.
In our practice, this is not an isolated case. It happened more than once that the car was parked on the side of the road, and the fine came for parking on the lawn. In one of our cases, the car was parked on a dirt driveway to a construction site and was being unloaded - even in such an absurd situation, MADI attracted the owner of the vehicle under Art. 8.25 ZGM 45.
PS The fine was canceled by the decision of the Preobrazhensky District Court of Moscow dated March 10, 2021, case No. 12-0424/2021.
Can lawn parking tickets be waived in 2021?
Yes. Any administrative proceeding can be challenged; we have provided the general procedure for filing a complaint in a separate article, and imposing a fine for stopping on a lawn is no exception. But one condition is important: in order to successfully appeal it, you need to prove its illegality. If you have strong evidence of the illegality of the decision, then the penalties must be cancelled. The general appeal procedure is enshrined in Article 30.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation.
You have 2 options to initiate the appeal process. You can contact both the traffic police, which issued the decision, and the court. At the same time, an appeal through the court is possible in any case, even without contacting other government agencies. That is, even if you are denied satisfaction at the traffic police department, you can still go to court.
In what cases is punishment legal?
And here we note the main thing - if you really violated, then there may be no grounds for canceling the lawn fine. Thus, you will simply waste your time writing and submitting your application. No, we are not asking people to be held accountable for their violations – although that might be fair. We are only pointing out the possible futility of this exercise if there are no reasons to cancel the fine.
In practice in 2021, almost every violator initially understands that he is acting against established prohibitions. If you actually parked on the lawn in a prohibited place, then the punishment will be legal.
At the same time, if they try to prosecute the car owner without clear evidence, then an appeal will be the only effective option to avoid unfair sanctions.
Is it worth challenging at all or is it easier to pay?
In most cases, it is worth challenging the decisions made for a number of reasons:
- errors in automated systems (for example, “Moscow Assistant” may mistakenly consider the violator’s car to be the vehicle of a driver who has been fined for parking on the lawn),
- abuses by traffic police officers who unreasonably issue fines against drivers,
- ambiguity of regulation - any evidence of a violation must be obtained in a legal way, and the person is considered innocent until such evidence exists; and in this regard, in 2021 there are a large number of legislative gaps.
Finally, the appeal itself is a completely free procedure. You have nothing to lose if you try to challenge tickets for parking on grass.
Expert opinion
Yuri Panchenko
Driving instructor, human rights activist, author of books. 10 years of experience.
The area where grass grows is not always a lawn.
The city has amenities, buildings and structures, an industrial zone, and roads. Legislation strictly regulates activities in any field. And what is called a “lawn” near the house is called a “greening area” within the roads.
Activities in the field of improvement are regulated by the legislation of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation. Activities in the road sector are regulated exclusively at the federal level. For example, the prohibition to damage grass within green areas, green strips, squares or boulevards is contained in the Law on Highways and Road Activities. Everything that is located within the road right of way has nothing to do with local legislation.
Accordingly, damage to the lawn near a house or in a park is punishable under the local Code of Administrative Violations. There are corresponding articles in the legislation of absolutely every subject.
Damage to grass within the green zone, green strip, as well as driving onto the grass in the territory of squares and boulevards should be punishable under the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offences. But there are no corresponding articles in the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation yet.
From here we come to a conclusion. Before penalizing a driver for damaging grass, it is necessary to determine where the grass grew. If there is a road within the right of way, there is no penalty for damaging it. If you are outside the road, please pay a fine!
Ask a Question
What procedural violations are often committed by MADI under Art. 8.25 ZGM 45?
Procedural violations when bringing to administrative responsibility are quite common and can often be decisive in court, since violation of the procedure for bringing to responsibility established by law violates the rights of the person brought to account and entails the unconditional cancellation of the fine. According to the current legislation, a citizen (legal entity, individual entrepreneur, etc.) is given the right to protection, which he has the right to exercise, including at the time of drawing up a protocol on an administrative offense, i.e. be present during its preparation, submit petitions, challenges, present evidence, etc. This rule of law does not apply only to violations recorded using automatic violation recording systems (for example, road cameras) - i.e. special certified technical means for automatically recording violations, and calling the offender to draw up a protocol is not necessary only in this case. However, most protocols under Art. 8.25 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of Moscow is drawn up after complaints from “initiative” citizens who record violations on the camera of their mobile phone and send them to the PAK PM application (Software and hardware complex “Moscow Assistant”).
“PAK PM” (Software and hardware complex “Moscow Assistant”) and a citizen’s mobile phone are not a special certified technical means of automatically recording offenses!
From the above, it should be concluded that when you immediately receive a ready-made resolution with a fine, but you were not called to draw up a protocol on an administrative offense at MADI, the procedure for bringing to administrative responsibility was violated, and you are deprived of the right to defense. To prove this fact, it is necessary to file a corresponding petition in court to request the materials of the administrative case from MADI (the court itself will not request anything on its own initiative). From the materials received at the request, it will be clear that the protocol was drawn up in the absence of the person involved; there are no summonses in the material to draw up a protocol. Practice shows that this method of defense works well in Moscow courts.
Who fixes parking on the lawn?
Usually this is an active citizen with a phone, but sometimes it happens like in the photo above.
How to challenge a fine for parking on the lawn?
It happens that the fine according to the MADI resolution is justified. However, often the officers of the authority act lawlessly. For example, he issues fines for parking off the lawn. This happened in the dispute in case No. 7-0013/2018: the driver parked the car in the courtyard of a residential building and received a MADI fine for parking on the lawn. In court it was possible to prove that the area where the motorist parked was not a lawn.
In Moscow there is an AIS “Register of Green Spaces”, which helps determine where there is parking on the lawn and where there is not.
Also, decisions are often made without evidence, in violation of the procedure for making a decision on bringing to administrative responsibility. This was the case in case No. 12-963/2018. The owner of the car was brought to justice, citing only a photo from which it was impossible to determine the place, time and date of the shooting. And there are many such situations. If you think that your case is one of those listed, you must definitely challenge the fine. This can be done within 10 days from the date of the decision. Therefore, it is better to immediately contact a car lawyer: there will be no time to study legislation, practice and collect evidence at random.
Algorithm for challenging a fine for parking on a lawn
- Drawing up an application to appeal the decision. The defense position depends on the specific situation. For example, did not park in a planted area, the parking area is not a lawn, a forced stop on a lawn as a result of an emergency, parking on a lawn has not been proven, etc.
- Collection of evidence: photo and video recording of the area, extract from AIS, witnesses, etc.
- Submitting an application to the court with evidence attached.
- Presenting a position in court.
You can also challenge the fine through the Autocode portal, the Government’s electronic reception desk and MADI.
What will happen after the court decision and the cancellation of the fine for parking on the lawn in relation to a legal entity?
After the court cancels the decision to hold your company administratively liable, the court will send its decision to MADI (you can receive it on purpose and duplicate the sending in person) and then the individual will be held accountable, with a fine of 5,000 rubles (although this also happens not always, there are cases when MADI misses the deadline for bringing to justice and then the case ends without a fine). If the bailiffs have already initiated enforcement proceedings against your company, then it is subject to termination; if they managed to write something off from the organization’s current account, then this money will be returned to you.
Parking on the lawn in Moscow: procedure for recording a violation and bringing to justice
A violation related to parking on a lawn in Moscow can be recorded by:
- traffic police officers;
- MADI inspectors;
- technical means (cameras);
- local government bodies;
- any resident of the capital (there are special applications for this, for example, “People's Inspector”).
Then the photo or video recording material is transferred to MADI employees, who review the materials and decide whether to impose a penalty in the form of a fine.
MADI (Moscow Administrative Traffic Police) is a special executive body in the capital, which, in particular, monitors compliance with parking rules and issues fines for parking on the lawn.
The inspector makes a decision to prosecute and sends it to the violator within three days. If the motorist does not agree with him, he can challenge the MADI fine for illegal parking.
Is there a fine for parking on the lawn in winter? Is there a fine? The answer is yes, there are and they are attracted.
MADI attracts for parking on the lawn in winter according to Art. 8.25 ZGM No. 45 is exactly the same as in the summer. Active citizens still continue to use the PAK-PM application and take photographs of cars parked where the lawn is not even visible, and legal entities and individuals receive fines of 300,000 rubles. and 5,000 rub. respectively. Formally, from a legal point of view, the authorized body explains such actions quite simply - just because the lawn is covered with snow and is not visible, it has not ceased to be a lawn, which means it is still impossible to place vehicles there. After the snow melts, the soil cover will be damaged in any case, which in the summer will negatively affect the already green plantings. When defending themselves in court, representatives of MADI literally say the following: “In winter, the lawn does not die, the root system does not go anywhere, it is alive and overwinters under the snow, and a 2-ton car, pushing through the snow cover with its weight, destroys it.”
Another question is how the court will react to the argument that since under a layer of snow it was impossible in principle to determine where the border of the roadway lies and the territory occupied by green spaces begins, then the driver should not be held responsible for such a violation, and in this case, for example, utilities are to blame services? The answer is that the court will react positively, this is a weighty argument and the chances of canceling this fine are greatly increased. The resolution itself on bringing to administrative responsibility from MADI always contains, on the front side, a photograph of the offense (black and white, of dubious quality), so it would not be amiss for the court to attach to it your good and color photograph of the place where the violation was committed, in which The absurdity of the situation will be much more visible. The photo must be taken from several angles with reference to the address - the nearest buildings with address signs (street, house number) should be visible in the photo.
To summarize the above, in winter people are attracted for parking on the lawn in exactly the same way as in summer. The difference is that when you go to court to appeal this fine, you have one more weighty argument in your arsenal than in the summer. The main thing is not to take the position of “there is no lawn there, there is snow there.” This position is incorrect. Subject to proof is the impossibility for the driver, due to circumstances beyond his control, to determine where the border of the roadway lies and the territory formally occupied by green spaces begins.
Have you finished reading the material and haven’t found the answer, do you have any more questions?
Leave a request or call and get a brief consultation with a lawyer!
Is it possible to pay a fine for parking on a lawn at a discount?
The fine for parking on the lawn cannot be paid at a discount, since it does not apply to violations of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation.
However, the size of the fine for the organization can now be reduced. On April 7, 2021, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation ruled that the fine for a legal entity provided for by the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation or any regional law can be reduced to half if:
- the minimum fine for a legal entity for a violation exceeds 100,000 rubles;
- there are mitigating circumstances.
To prove the presence of mitigating circumstances, you need to go to court.
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