The EU Court of Justice rules on Uber’s services and its doctrine is applied by the Supreme Court.
On 20th December, the European Court of Justice ruled in a preliminary ruling by the Mercantile Court No. 3 of Barcelona on the type of service offered by the Uber company: a transport service or an intermediary service between travellers and non-professional drivers. In the second case, Uber’s activity could fall within the scope of the European directives on information society services and thus fall within the scope of the principle of freedom to provide services, where an administrative activity licence is not required. However, the Court found that Uber is not merely a platform for intermediation between passengers and drivers, but that the intermediary service is an indissoluble part of a global transport package, since Uber controls the basic conditions of the service. Therefore, their activity is excluded from the application of directives and subject to national law.
A month later, the Supreme Court, in its decision No. 87/2018 of 25th January, ruled on the appeal brought by the Generalitat de Catalunya against the ruling that upheld Uber’s contentious administrative appeal and annulled the sanction that the Generalitat had imposed on him for the unauthorized provision of non-collective public transport services.
Applying the doctrine of the Court of Justice set forth above, the Supreme Court determines that the services offered by Uber must necessarily be qualified as transportation, and not as information society services. With regard to the applicable sanctioning norm, it considers that the Catalan taxi law cannot be applicable because the services offered by Uber are different from taxi. Due to the lack of specific autonomous regulation of this service, Law 16/87 of 30th July on Land Transport Planning and its sanctioning regime will be applicable. As to the merits of the case, the Court orders the review of the proceedings at first instance in order to examine the grounds for challenging the sanction put forward by Uber: infringement of some principles (typicity, lack of adequacy to type,infringement of presumption of innocence and non bis in idem.