Seizing the keys to the car of the parents to go for a ride is a theft, with regard to the insurance, which excludes any guarantee for its author in the event of an accident, judged the Court of Cassation.
The Court, following the argument of an insurer, therefore deprived of all compensation a teenager injured in the accident of the family car whose keys he had taken from his mother’s bag. This judgment was rendered by the criminal chamber on March 21.
The young man had given the keys to a cousin before getting into the car as a passenger, but the driver had lost control of the car and they had been injured.
The accomplices of a theft are not covered by the insurance
The passenger invoked the 1985 law which obliges insurers of vehicles involved in an accident to fully compensate for the damage suffered by injured passengers. He explained that he had not committed any inexcusable fault which would have been the exclusive cause of the accident since he was not driving and that by taking the keys, he had not created any obvious particular danger. The exclusions from compensation for automobile insurance provided for by the law of 1985 were therefore not met.
The judges did not contest this point but they recalled that if the law requires insurers to cover the civil liability of any driver, even unauthorized, it provides that the authors, co-authors or accomplices of the theft of the vehicle are not not covered by insurance.
The vehicle was smuggled from its legitimate owners
Borrowing his parents’ car to go clandestinely for a ride is not theft, pleaded the young man, because theft presupposes the will to appropriate someone else’s thing, which was of course not the case. case for this borrowing which comes under disobedience.
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But the vehicle was smuggled from its rightful owners, the judges said. It is the appropriation of someone else’s thing against the will of its owner and it is theft under insurance law. Even if, in criminal law on the other hand, there is no theft between parents and children and therefore no prosecution, concluded the Court of Cassation.
The injured young passenger is therefore not entitled to any compensation.
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