Translation of "Premier élément d'un couple " (French → English) :

G. whereas, in the manufacturing sector, the share of material cost as part of the total production costs is significantly higher than the share related to workers’ payroll and whereas, in all sectors, the upward trend in the former is not expected to be reversed, at least in the medium term,

The first of these components is for the European Union to appoint a climate change ‘tsar’ with a mandate to negotiate on behalf of the 27 Member States, unlike what happened in Copenhagen, where we had the Danish Prime Minister, the Swedish Prime Minister, the President of the Commission, Mr Sarkozy, Mrs Merkel, yourself, Mr Brown.

We have therefore proposed that, at the time when Europe enlarges, and not until then, we will add two elements to Croatia’s Treaty of Accession: the first will be an ‘Irish’ protocol, and the second will relate to the number of MEPs.

The first information item in the first subfield is ‘1’, to refer to this Type-1 record.

Consequently, on the basis of the work of these four working groups, we proposed this compromise with three legs; the first one relates to own resources: own resources will be decided by the governments and subject to ratification by national parliaments; the second is the financial perspectives: the Inter-institutional Agreement is incorporated into the Constitution and they will be approved as from those of 2006 by a qualified majority in the Council and with the approval of the European Parliament; and, thirdly, the budget: Parliament will have the final word with regard to the spending chapter, the distinction, which has always se ...[+++]emed to us to be bizarre, between compulsory and non-compulsory expenditure having disappeared, but this is an approval subject to brakes and obstacles, since in order to have the final word, this Parliament must have a majority of 3/5.

The life expectancy of the provisions currently proposed or in preparation must be long enough to permit an initial pattern of convergence and to found a certain number of conclusions, possibly proceeding from an initial series of Community court decisions.