Mr. Jorge Jacob,
General Director of Terrestrial
Transports,
Ministry of Transport, Portugal
Electronics changed our daily life and transformed
our society, by facilitating access to information and speeding up its
processing, allowing immediate availability, anywhere and, in a relatively safe
way.
The speed of communications and the automatic
information revolutionized all economic sectors, modified relationships between
enterprises, their customers, and their collaborators at both organization and
management level.
Electronics are present in the transport industry and
services, and are used in all stages of implementation and organisation of the
latter. They influence and create a new dynamic in the production and
performance of means of transport and other related equipment and in company
management and logistics in the sector.
The profits brought by electronics, visible in the
transport sector, enhance its performance:
In vehicles and other equipment
In infrastructures and traffic control
In orientation systems and vehicle
localisation
In fleets and freight management
In ticketing and load documents
In way of payment
In security mechanisms
The contractual relationships are processed in a new
dynamic and, even though in a less prompt manner, regulations are starting to
reflect the developments, as electronic contracts and documents are already
recognized by established law.
The electronic commerce already reached significant
levels in the worldwide economy and the trend is showing a constant increase of
electronic commerce operations.
It is assumed that transport law will develop in a
new agility as secured information allows to guarantee the effectiveness of its
rules and to accept, without reserves, the path to dematerialization.
However, we are still a few steps away from a
complete equivalence between paper and electronic documents, and legal
authorities must still eliminate all barriers to electronics contracts. It is
necessary to overcome the inertia that characterises legal rules and usually
only consecrates consolidated practices. On the contrary, because they guarantee
the safeguard of ethic values, they are indispensable to the expansion of new
procedures.
The Portuguese law has already integrated, in the
Law-Decree n. 7/2004, 7 January, the provisions of the directive n. 2000/31/CE
on the electronic commerce. This Directive is an important landmark for the
elimination of impediments to electronic contracts by the legal security brought
to the users, which also contributes to their faster diffusion.
More and more, public administrations use the
opportunities of electronics, which provide a better performance of their
regulation functions and, overall, make taxation effective and quick.
The combined reflection in this Symposium about
transport law and electronic age, aimed particularly at the transport document
and contract, will be a contribution to the adjustment and harmonization of the
transport contract in law structure to the documentary
dematerialisation.
