Europa Newswire

February 4, 2010

By Amy Lieberman

UNITED NATIONS – Diplomatic immunity might allow foreign embassies to avoid paying parking fines, but it doesn’t allow them to wipe away, and forget, just how much they owe the city of New York.

The total?

It’s nearly $18 million dollars, with the Top Ten worst offenders accounting for approximately $8 million of this staggering figure.

Egypt, Kuwait and Nigeria now lead with the most outstanding levels of debt – Egypt owes NYC close to $2 million, with Kuwait lagging behind slightly its owed $1.2 million, followed by Nigeria, with $1 million in 8,380 unpaid tickets to its name.

There’s nothing new about foreign missions accumulating massive amounts of parking tickets – and doing nothing about them – but New York Representative Anthony Weiner is now proposing a piece of legislation that will impose stricter penalties on embassies that fail to pay up.

The legislation would require the U.S. State Department to grant NYC the funds it now accordingly withholds from offending embassies, but funnels into different programs. Nearly 85 percent of the countries that owe NYC parking ticket fines receive aid from the U.S., according to Weiner’s office.

“This is an issue that we have looked at before, but as the city is in such a financial crisis, it becomes particularly upsetting when you have so much money owed to the city and none of it is coming to us,” said a Weiner spokesperson.

Calls to the Egyptian embassies were not returned; Kuwait, which does not present have an permanent representative serving at the United Nations Secretariat, funnelled interview requests to a Kuwait News Agency United Nations Correspondent, who could not speak on behalf of the mission. Calls to the lawyer representing the Permanent Mission of Nigeria were not returned.

Indonesia, Brazil, Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal, Sudan and Angola, respectively, trail these three leading countries in the most amassed numbers of unpaid parking tickets.

Yet the trend of casting aside fines has lessened dramatically during the past few years under the Bloomberg Administration, which began stripping diplomats’ cars of their license plates. Previously, under the 2002 Clinton-Schumer Amendment, the city gained the right to tow diplomatic vehicles and revoke their official parking permits.

This latest penalty of pulling the plates, though, has proved substantially more effective, according to UC Berkeley economics professor Edward Miguel.

“Stripping of the diplomatic plates is different from towing – when a car gets towed, it is just a hassle, and the city of New York has tried that before,” said Miguel, who is the co-author of the widely circulated research paper, “Cultures of Corruption: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets.” “But getting your plates stripped is much more of a big deal. New York did that with a few of the missions, and once they did, the number of parking violations fell a lot, by like more than 90 percent.

“For the first time, missions didn’t have total impunity, and they did react to that sentence.”

Miguel and Columbia University economics professor Sam Fisman analyzed the larger implications of countries not paying their parking tickets in their 2006 aforementioned paper, which tracks issued tickets from 1997 to 2005. Their analysis revealed larger connections between countries that have outstanding fines, and how those numbers “strongly positively correlated with other country corruption measures,” according to the study.

It also unveiled other trends, like how “Muslim majority countries did have a big track in getting issued parking tickets, and there was a large drop in this after 9/11,” Miguel said.

Countries whose native populations have unfavorable view of the United States also tend to have greater number of parking violations, according to Miguel, perhaps indicative of the general level of respect given to their host nation and city. 

“It’s really interesting,” Miguel said. “Attitudes can really shape people’s propensities to obeying the law, or not… most criminologists would find it reasonable that crimes are deterred often because we don’t want to commit those crimes.”

The United Nations has deferred responsibility over holding missions accountable to New York, as Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson Martin Nesirky told Inner City Press, “The Secretary-General is not responsible.”

With Congressman Weiner’s legislation progressing, supported also by a complimentary bill making the rounds in the Senate, NY may well succeed in once and for all curbing the rate of parking violations.

“It’s insulting to all New Yorkers that countries like Yemen, Zimbabwe and Iran owe the City millions in unpaid parking tickets,” Weiner said in a media release. “Diplomats park illegally, ignore paying their parking tickets and expect New Yorkers to pick up the tab. This needs to end.””