Is the central administration or are the regional ones, or are both, to be able to legislate in the matter of use of the harbour areas? A question that has repeatedly been put in Italy where in recent years, following the reform introduced in 2001 of Title V of the Constitution, the role of regional institutions has strengthened, but is even more felt in Spain where autonomous communities have significant powers that sometimes conflict with those of the national government. These conflicts are also resolved by the Constitutional Court in Spain.

So it was yesterday when the Plenary of the Constitutional Court of Spain, partially accepting the recourse of unconstitutionality submitted by the President of the Government, rejected a regulation of the Generalitat Valenciana which imposes a kilometre space of the fuel tanks relative to the housing centers. The decision, of which President Cándido Conde-Pumpido Tourón was rapporteur, was unanimously approved.

In particular, the section of the measure of the Valencian Community contested, that is article 173 of the law 7/2021 of 29 December last, establishes a minimum safety distance of 1.000 meters regarding the land classified as residential, school or sanitary, and for special tertiary use, to authorize the realization of tanks of stocking of oil products of beyond 5.000 cubic meters located within the harbour compendium. Specifically, the State Advocate considers that the contested precept, due to its undifferentiated character as to its scope of application - state ports and regional ports -, interferes in the exercise of the state powers in order to determine the service area, through the corresponding Delimitation of Spazi and Usi Portuali (DEUP), in the ports of general interest located in the territory of the Valenciana Autonoma Community.

Illustrating the judgment, the Constitutional Court has specified that it addresses, firstly, the delimitation of the judicial litigation, underlining that the censored precept does not implement, as the Valencian Generalitat argues, a discipline that affects materially in the matter of safety at work, according to the strong territorial and urban character of the prescriptions it contains. Then the sentence examines the constitutional doctrine on the ports of general interest in order to specify the functions of the notion of "general interest" as criterion to limit the scope of the state competence in harbour matter and to modulate the regional competence in matter of management of the territory and urban planning and, in this last case, as criterion of prevalence for the resolution of conflicts of interest.

The decision stipulates that the censored section effectively regulates the intervention of autonomy with respect to a state decision - the elaboration and approval of the DEUP - and does so with such intensity to imply the prevailing of the autonomous criterion in a way that must be considered contrary to the constitutional order of distribution of powers, which - the Constitutional Court has explained - has led to accept the application for unconstitutionality.