Russian diplomats urged to ‘respect Japan law’ as 2,300 parking tickets remain unpaid

According to Fuji News Network, vehicles carrying diplomatic plates identifying them as belonging to the Russian embassy in Tokyo, or one of its four consulates across the country, had accumulated 2,338 unpaid parking tickets in the five years to 2022.

Those cases accounted for 59 per cent of the total of outstanding fines among diplomatic vehicles, reported the news channel, which filed a freedom-of-information request with the National Police Agency to obtain the details.

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The report did not state the value of the outstanding parking fines, but when comparable figures were released in 2021, they showed that the 3,948 violations that were still outstanding came to around 40 million yen (US$268,000) in total.

“We expect all diplomats to respect Japanese laws,” an official of the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Missions Division told This Week in Asia.

“We accept that mistakes happen and must point out that when diplomats receive parking fines, then most normally pay. The problem really is the overdue fines that are not being paid,” added the official, who declined to be named. “There has been an improvement in recent years and China, in particular, is doing much better.”

There were 3,228 outstanding fines in 2018 – of which Russian vehicles accounted for three-quarters, or 2,396 violations – and 2,736 cases in 2019.

Yakov Zinberg, a professor of international relations at Tokyo’s Kokushikan University, said it was “hard to explain” why Russian diplomats refused to pay their fines.

“This has clearly been going on for some time, so it is not something that we can link to Ukraine and Russia in some way trying to cause problems for Japan to indicate that it is unhappy with Tokyo for supporting Kyiv,” he said.

“On the contrary, I think Russian diplomats will have been told to be even more careful than before and not to attract negative attention in the countries where they are stationed,” he said.

“That is why I do not think this is deliberate, although it is inexplicable that they are not paying the fines when they are summoned to the ministry.”

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The foreign ministry official said Japan had a few tools at its disposal to encourage diplomatic missions to pay up, starting with a summons to appear at the ministry to be reminded of their responsibilities under Japanese law and that diplomatic immunity provided by the Vienna Convention does not cover parking tickets.

The convention, however, does not permit the Japanese authorities to confiscate personal property to compensate for the outstanding fines, as it would if the violations were carried out by a Japanese person, rendering the ministry’s warnings largely toothless.

If the ministry’s initial approach fails to have the desired results, representations about the worst offenders can be made directly to ambassadors.

The ministry stepped up the pressure in May 2021 when it announced that it would refuse to provide petrol tax exemptions to foreign diplomats if they failed to pay off their parking fines.

“We have started to check before we issue tax exemption coupons to make sure they have no overdue fines,” the ministry official said. “If they want new coupons, then they have to pay. None of them is happy, but they do realise they have to pay.”