5. Instructs its President to forward its position to the Council, the Commission, the European Asylum Support Office and the national parliaments.

7. Deplores the lack of reliable official statistics on unaccompanied minors; calls on the Member States and the Commission to improve the collection of statistics on unaccompanied minors, including age and gender statistics, to improve the comparability of statistics collection across Member States, to establish a coordinated method for gathering and sharing information in each Member State, while ensuring that personal data is protected, by means of platforms bringing together all parties involved in the issue of unaccompanied minors and of a list of national contact points and to make better use of the tools already available to coll ...[+++]ect statistics at EU level, such as Eurostat, Frontex, the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and the European Migration Network; stresses that the purpose of gathering such data is to achieve a better understanding of the situation, to improve the protection of unaccompanied minors and to better respond to their needs; calls on the Commission, the Member States, the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) and international and non‑governmental organisations to make additional efforts, in gathering, monitoring and exchanging accurate data broken down by gender, to have an exhaustive overview of the number of unaccompanied girls and to be able to examine the specific needs of this group with a view to providing them with support and implementing specific measures to address those needs, and to exchange best practices with a view to making improvements;

The Commission’s preliminary investigation indicated potential competition concerns in the market for the supply of office products to business customers through international contracts in the European Economic Area (EEA), as well as in the market for the supply of office products to business customers through national contracts in the Netherlands and Sweden.

Set clear and ambitious national targets in March for RD spending by 2010, as while progress has been substantial, the EU as a whole is set to fall short of the 3% target for total public and private investment in RD: Set 2% of GDP as a common target for spending on higher education by 2010; Free universities to access top-up private funding and end barriers to public-private partnerships by the end of 2007; All technical universities should have a technology transfer office to, for example, commercialise in partnership with industry the inventions, patents, licenses etc that result from their research; Set 2009-10 academic year as a target start d ...[+++]ate for a European Institute of Technology; Member States to deliver on their commitment to put in place comprehensive Lifelong Learning Strategies by the end of 2006. Proficiency in maths and science to be stepped up to enhance people’s ability to innovate; Member States to provide for compulsory teaching of two foreign languages in their national education systems.

Ken Bodfish of the Local Government International Bureau (LGIB), welcomed the Commission’s decentralised approach to cohesion policy in the next financial perspective, but emphasised that national action plans must reflect the Union’s priorities better than in the past: there had been a tendency for national interests to override European, regional and local interests.

- setting up a European network of national transit coordinators and local transit contacts in every large customs office;