Opinion of Mr Advocate General Mancini

Mr President,

Members of the Court,

1. By application dated 28 February 1986 the Commission of the European Communities has requested the Court to declare that, by adopting the Road Vehicles Lighting Regulations, the United Kingdom has infringed the provisions of Council Directive 76/756/EEC of 27 July 1976 on the approximation of the laws of the Member States relating to the installation of lighting and light-signalling devices on motor vehicles and their trailers (Official Journal L 262, p. 1) and has therefore failed to fulfil its obligations under the Treaty of Rome.

2. To begin with, a word of warning. In the English text the words Annex I are not followed by the comma which appears in all the other language versions. The parties have taken this as a cue for a series of propositions, not surprisingly directly opposed, on the meaning of the provision. This argument seems to me quite futile. The presence or absence of a punctuation mark, the use of which in the various languages is different and largely a matter of taste cannot have the significance which is binc inde attributed to it. I would add that, when the language versions of a Community provision do not agree, the provision must be interpreted by reference to the purpose and general scheme of the rules of which it forms a part (judgment of 28 March 1985 in Case 100/84 Commission v United Kingdom [1985] ECR 1177, paragraph 17).

3. Let us begin by asking ourselves what are the background to and the aim of the piece of legislation which we are called upon to interpret. After finding that the provisions on the lighting equipment of motor vehicles varied substantially from one country to another, the Commission considered it expedient to require the Member States to supplement or replace their rules with identical requirements in order ... to allow the EEC type-approval procedure which was the subject of Council Directive 70/156/EEC ... to be introduced in respect of each type of vehicle. The legislation with which we are concerned therefore constitutes the first step in a policy which has its sights set on a far more ambitious objective: the introduction of a single certificate of conformity on the basis of which the vehicles manufactured in a Member State may be approved in every other Member State of the Community without undergoing further checks.

4. In the light of the foregoing considerations I propose that the Court declare that, by requiring manufacturers to equip vehicles intended to be approved and put into service after 1 April 1987, the United Kingdom has infringed the provisions of Directive 76/756/EEC of 27 July 1976 and has therefore failed to fulfil its obligations under the Treaty.

1 Translated from the Italian.