Romanian road transport law

The road transport law only partially harmonizes the Romanian and European legislations and does not regulate the access to the profession, the regime and severity of punishments, according to the National Union of Road Hauliers from Romania (UNTRR).

In a release UNTRR rejects the provisions of the ordinance on the road transport law and asks for the setting up of a working group meant to draw up the road transport law.

The Union considers that the ordinance draft presented by the Ministry of Transports and Infrastructure does not take into account the suggestions made by the social partners, suggestions that were sent to it in the course of time, but also after the publication of the draft ordinance on the site of the Ministry, and the Romanian legislation in the field and the European one only partially harmonize.

Most elements that should have been regulated by the law, such as the access to the procession, the way to carry out transports, the regime of punishments, the severity of punishments, etc, are also left to be adopted subsequently by a Government resolution or, even worse, by an order of the minister.

The Ministry, say the UNTRR representatives, does not want to simplify the legislation in the field, but, on the contrary, to over-regulate it, especially through norm setting documents that are inferior to the law.

UNTRR also finds that the stability in this field and the possibility to prepare a business plan and to put it into practice go on being illusions. And, in keeping with the previous experience, is due to the fact that issuing such an ordinance, though it is constitutional, actually means taking over the tasks of the legislature, which brings about an enhanced instability of the field regulated by it. One can give as an example the progress of the main regulation of the road transport, which was adopted as an ordinance too, that, over 1997-2011, was amended no less than 25 times (actually about two amendments a year), of which 15 were made through other ordinances and emergency ordinances.

Moreover, says UNTRR, the initiators did not know the project that had been started, they did not know, among other things, why the Protection and Guard Service and the Ministry of Agriculture were mentioned as approvers, and that, instead of working as a mediator in the case of some possible diverging opinions among hauliers, the representatives of the Ministry worked to create some dissensions among the representatives of the road hauliers attending the talks.

The National Union of Road Hauliers from Romania is a nongovernmental, independent, apolitical professional and employer organization, founded in 1990 on democratic principles, which promotes and defends the interests of road hauliers domestically and internationally, with a membership of 13,000, operators that carry goods and persons in Romania and abroad.