I guess you are deferring (appealing?) to the authority of the International Organization for Standardization and their list of country codes then, which is fai

I guess you are deferring (appealing?) to the authority of the International Organization for Standardization and their list of country codes then, which is fair enough, but not really to the Passport Office, which doesn't make mention of the word country in their passports and is not really weighing in on this semantic dispute, despite using an ISO code. I'm not trying to advance any evidence that Scotland etc. "really are" countries, rather that it is very common usage of the word, per wikipedia it seems that even the Prime Minister's office and the ONS use it, as does more or less everyone I know, that is all.