Use ICAO codes for nationality and issuer country?

Issue #1099 resolved
Torsten Lodderstedt created an issue

Marcos Sanz brought this up in his recent review.

“At the moment the spec does not link verified data to its respective
evidence at all, even when there are multiple evidences (s. for instance
the example in section 6.2 with ID document AND utility bill), so I don't
think we would (or actually do) need that capability. On the other hand,
you might be right with regard to an entity verifying one nationality and
not all of them. So I don't really need the multiple nationalities
feature.

What I just came up with and actually think to be more important than
multiple nationalities (warning: I am not an expert in this topic!) is the
fact that the ICAO Machine Readable Passports specification asserts
nationality by means of their ICAO codes (
https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p3_cons_en.pdf), which
expand ISO 3166 because they also have to deal with UN travel documents
and other various issuing authorities. ICAO even reserve nationality codes
for stateless people. For a good summary read
https://www.iso.org/news/2011/04/Ref1604.html rather than the ICAO PDF.

So while ISO3166 initially seemed to us initially like the natural fit to
describe "issuer country" and "nationality", we might be excluding
(discriminating?) identities from being describable with our spec.

Are ICAO codes maybe the better way to go?“

Comments (7)

  1. Torsten Lodderstedt reporter

    I support this proposal as it “just” extends the ISO codes by codes for several organisations who may issue travel documents. So it does not hurt. But I would like to get feedback from the group before changing the spec.

  2. Torsten Lodderstedt reporter

    I just found an issue with this change. Adopting ICAO only makes sense if we change to 3-letter codes since their are no 2-letter codes for stateless people and international organisations.

  3. Torsten Lodderstedt reporter

    Changed format of nationalities and issuing country to ICAO codes with 2-letter codes as default and 3-letter codes as an option.

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