ISO 3166 and the UN
The United Nations, some of its specialized agencies and other sub-organizations of the UN play several important roles with regard to ISO 3166-1.
- First, four members of the ISO 3166/MA are from the UN environment.
- Second, the UN organizations are major users of ISO 3166. For example the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE) use the alpha-2 code from ISO 3166-1 for their country coding systems. (See examples for implementations of ISO 3166-1)
- Third, the numeric-3 code for the country names in ISO 3166-1 is developed and maintained by the United Nations Statistics Division in New York. It is given in ISO 3166-1 just as the alpha-3 code is given in the UNSD-list for reference purposes.
- Fourth, the country names used in ISO 3166-1 are all from United Nations sources. Using these country names officially notified by the countries to the UN Secretary General helps in keeping ISO 3166-1 politically neutral and thus acceptable to as many users as possible.
This strong involvement of various UN experts in the maintenance of ISO 3166 was established in the development phase of the standard in the early 1970s. It is one of the contributing factors to ISO 3166 having gained the global acceptance it has today.