This European Standard specifies the order between two character strings composed of characters from the Modern European Scripts (MES) collection of ISO/IEC 10646:2003 or subsets of it. NOTE Collection 283 Modern European Scripts (MES) of ISO/IEC 10646:2003 was originally specified in CEN Workshop Agreement 13873:2000 Multilingual European Subsets of ISO/IEC 10646 as Multilingual European Subset Number 3 and was subsequently incorporated as a collection in Annex A of ISO/IEC 10646:2003 alongside its sister collections MES-1 and MES-2. The ordering rules specified in this European Standard are only applicable for lists of data in more than one European language and when this data is intended for a multicultural audience. They complement existing national standards or practices in the field.