A joint statement signed by drivers at the scene, whose ticked boxes determine how liability is apportioned.
The European accident statement is a declaration drawn up and signed jointly by the drivers involved, immediately after a collision and before memories diverge. Its evidential weight is considerable because it amounts to a mutual admission: what each driver signed can be used against them, and retracting it requires showing an error or defective consent, which rarely succeeds. Its decisive part is not the remarks section, which drivers fill in carefully, but the circumstance boxes and the sketch, which alone feed the handling of the file. Those boxes determine the typed collision scenario under the agreements between insurers, and therefore the apportionment of liability, often before any lawyer has opened the file. The document is harmonized across Europe, which allows it to be completed in two different languages while pointing to the same boxes. The problem solved is the volatility of evidence in a brief event, without witnesses, where the two accounts diverge by the next day.
The form carries seventeen circumstance boxes, numbered identically in every European language, plus a sketch. It is those, and not the free text account, that feed the scale of the IRSA agreement in force between French motor insurers since 1968: ticking was reversing rather than was changing lanes is enough to move the apportionment from zero to a hundred.
constat européen d'accident, déclaration conjointe d'accident