Opinion of Mr Advocate General Lenz

Mr President,

Members of the Court,

The proceedings in which I'am giving my opinion today and which the Commission has brought against the Italian Republic are concerned with the question whether the practice of the Italian authorities in applying Council Regulation No 3164/76 on the Community quota for the carriage of goods by road between Member States (Official Journal 1976, L 357, p. 1) is compatible with that regulation.

I should like to make the following remarks by way of introduction :

1. Article 61 of the EEC Treaty provides that freedom to provide services in the field of transport is to be governed by the provisions of the Title relating to transport, that is Article 74 et seq. Article 75 (1) (a) provides that the Council is to lay down common rules applicable to international transport to or from the territory of a Member State or passing across the territory of one or more Member States; that was to be done according to Article 75 (2) during the transitional period.

2. As far as the Italian legal position is concerned, it is necessary to know that under authorizations issued to Italian undertakings a towing vehicle may not be coupled to a trailer belonging to another undertaking. Further, when checking authorizations issued in other Member States (and this relates both to Community quotas and bilateral quotas) in cases in which the vehicle is a coupled combination of two parts which arc registered in different Member States, the authorities require the production of two authorizations.

3. In the Commission's view that practice is incompatible with both Article 2 (3) of Regulation No 3164/76 and Article 3 (2) of Directive 65/269 which is to the same effect and applies to bilateral quotas. Accordingly, by letter dated 4 November 1981, it initiated the procedure under Article 169 of the EEC Treaty with a view to obtaining a declaration that the Italian Republic had infringed the EEC Treaty.

My views on that application and the issues raised by it are as follows:

The Commission's application must therefore be upheld and a declaration made as requested that the abovementioned Italian practice is incompatible with Community law. Further, as the Commission claims, the defendant must be ordered to pay the costs.

1 Translated from the German.