EU’s top court scraps controversial truck return obligation

The EU’s highest court threw out on Friday a controversial measure mandating that trucks have to return to their registered base every eight weeks, bringing an exceptionally bitter feud at the heart of the internal market to a close.

The truck return mandate aimed to prevent companies from setting up shop in low-cost countries while operating on a near-permanent basis in other parts of the bloc. But it outraged countries on the EU’s periphery, which feared it would effectively exclude them from the internal market.

The court said negotiators hadn’t done their homework before adding the measure.

“The Parliament and the Council have not established that they had sufficient information at their disposal when that measure was adopted to enable them to assess its proportionality,” the Court of Justice of the EU found.

The truck return obligation was, by far, the most controversial part of the Mobility Package reforms, which introduced new rules on truck drivers’ rest times, their right to local remuneration levels, and their ability to circulate within other countries to carry out deliveries there.

That proved highly incendiary: While richer member countries argued the measures were crucial to prevent cheaper truckers from other countries from undermining local drivers’ working conditions, Central and Eastern European countries said the measures were protectionist and undercut the single market.

Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus, Hungary, Malta and Poland brought a total of 15 overlapping challenges of the measures, but the Court of Justice upheld all other parts of the package.