We are all familiar with the appalling figures of death and injury due to road traffic crashes: 1.3 million people die and more than 50 million are injured each year on the roads. Putting these tragic numbers into a different perspective we can say that unless this poor road safety trend is arrested motorization will in the next 6o years take three times more lives than wars have done since the end of the Second World War. This simply cannot be accepted! The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and its member countries have, over the years, concentrated a lot of efforts to design and constantly up-date the international legal architecture for road safety, to