Naming and Code Construction
The country names used in ISO 3166-1 are taken from the two UN sources mentioned above. Some country names used by the UN, and accordingly by ISO, are subject to dispute:
- The Republic of Macedonia is listed as "Macedonia, the former Yugoslav Republic of" because of the Macedonia naming dispute, following the provisional reference used by the United Nations.
- Taiwan is listed as "Taiwan, Province of China" because of its political status within the United Nations: The UN does not recognize the Republic of China which governs Taiwan and considers the territory to be part of the People's Republic of China. In 2007, the Republic of China filed a lawsuit before a Swiss civil court against the ISO, arguing that the ISO's use of the UN name rather than "Republic of China (Taiwan)" violates Taiwan's name rights. On 9 September 2010, a panel of the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland decided, by three votes to two, to dismiss the suit as presenting a political question not subject to Swiss civil jurisdiction.
The codes are chosen, according to the ISO 3166/MA, "to reflect the significant, unique component of the country name in order to allow a visual association between country name and country code". For this reason, common components of country names like "Republic", "Kingdom", "United", "Federal" or "Democratic" are normally not used for deriving the code elements. As a consequence, for example, the United Kingdom is officially assigned the alpha-2 code GB rather than UK, based on its official name "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (although UK is reserved on the request of the United Kingdom). Some codes are chosen based on the native names of the countries. For example, Germany is assigned the alpha-2 code DE, based on its native name "Deutschland".
Read more about this topic: ISO 3166-1
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