CRIMINAL LAW DIVISION
Offences against road safety, as provided for and punished under Articles 379 and following of the Criminal Code, always entail the penalty of disqualification from driving motor vehicles and mopeds, in addition to the corresponding fine, community service, or prison sentence.
Until now, in practice, the enforcement of this penalty has repeatedly raised the question of whether it is possible to split the disqualification period—that is, to serve it in segments, alternating periods, weekends, holidays, or other “time windows”—at the request of the convicted person, mainly for work-related reasons, or whether, on the contrary, it must be served continuously for the duration set out in the judgment.
The Supreme Court has now addressed this issue in its recent Judgment No. 118/2026, of February 11, with the aim of putting an end to this debate. The Court considered that the matter had cassational interest—due to the need to unify case law—given the divergence among the Provincial Courts: some had systematically accepted (under strict conditions) the possibility of splitting the penalty, while others rejected it as incompatible with the legality of enforcement and the structure of the penalty.
The Criminal Chamber begins by summarizing the main arguments in favor of splitting the penalty, as upheld by some Provincial Courts:
(i) Article 47 of the Criminal Code does not expressly prohibit splitting the execution, so it could be interpreted that what matters is respecting the total duration of the disqualification, even if distributed over periods.
(ii) When the convicted person is a professional driver, the penalty conflicts with other constitutional rights, such as the right to work or the right to economic and legal protection of the family, requiring a balancing exercise to ensure compatibility without undermining preventive purposes.
(iii) It is necessary to avoid imposing an additional unintended burden on professional drivers; when driving is their essential work tool, serving the penalty may lead to further consequences such as job loss and family hardship.
(iv) In administrative traffic law, the splitting of driving suspensions has been accepted.
The judgment then reviews the prevailing case law position, which opposes splitting the penalty, ultimately adopting this view, unifying doctrine, and concluding that the disqualification from driving must be enforced in its legal form—as a continuous deprivation for the period set out in the judgment. This conclusion is based on the following reasons:
(i) The disqualification from driving is conceived as a temporary ban. Article 47 of the Criminal Code states that it “shall disqualify the offender from exercising those rights for the period established in the judgment.” The legal wording does not describe a sum of “days without driving” that can be distributed, but rather a continuous period of deprivation.
(ii) Splitting that period—creating intervals in which the offender regains the ability to drive—would transform the penalty from a temporary disqualification into a system of intermittent restriction, a modality not provided for by law and prohibited by the principle of legality in enforcement.
(iii) Article 384 of the Criminal Code punishes driving after being deprived of a driving licence by judicial decision, which is incompatible with redesigning the penalty as a system of “time windows.”
(iv) Article 794.2 of the Criminal Procedure Act requires the immediate withdrawal of the driving licence and its transfer to the administrative authority, showing that the legislator envisages uninterrupted enforcement, without periodic returns or activation/deactivation periods.
(v) Making the offender’s status as a professional driver a basis for “tailor-made” enforcement lacks legal support, undermines equality in the execution of penalties, empties the content of the temporary disqualification, creates a perception of selective
impunity, and weakens the deterrent and preventive effect of the penalty.
(vi) The purpose of special prevention must be fulfilled—namely, to protect society and correct risky behavior by temporarily removing from driving those who have demonstrated conduct incompatible with road safety.
In summary, the Supreme Court has established a unifying doctrine that prohibits splitting the driving disqualification penalty, which must be served continuously for the duration set out in the judgment.
