What is xxb nationality?

XXA: Stateless person, as per the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. persons (XXA), Convention Refugees (XXB), other refugees (XXC) and others with undetermined nationality (XXX). Nationality should be recorded by use of the UKBA standard nationality codes. 1, Nationality code values recognised in SMS from 10 April 2016. Nationality is not up to the person to "recognize themselves".

A machine-readable passport (MRP) is a machine-readable travel document (MRTD) with the data on the identity page encoded in optical character recognition format. Many countries began to issue machine-readable travel documents in the 1980s.

Most travel passports worldwide are MRPs. They are standardized by the ICAO Document 9303 (endorsed by the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission as ISO/IEC 7501-1) and have a special machine-readable zone (MRZ), which is usually at the bottom of the identity page at the beginning of a passport. The ICAO 9303 describes three types of documents corresponding to the ISO/IEC 7810 sizes:

The fixed format allows specification of document type, name, document number, nationality, date of birth, sex, and document expiration date. All these fields are required on a passport. There is room for optional, often country-dependent, supplementary information. There are also two sizes of machine-readable visas similarly defined.

Computers with a camera and suitable software can directly read the information on machine-readable passports. This enables faster processing of arriving passengers by immigration officials, and greater accuracy than manually-read passports, as well as faster data entry, more data to be read and better data matching against immigration databases and watchlists.

Apart from optically readable information, many passports contain an RFID chip which enables computers to read a higher amount of information, for example a photo of the bearer. These passports are called biometric passports and are also described by ICAO 9303.

Passport booklets have an identity page containing the identity data. This page is in the TD3 size of 125 × 88 mm (4.92 × 3.46 in).

The data of the machine-readable zone consists of two rows of 44 characters each. The only characters used are A–Z, 0–9 and the filler character <.

In the name field, spaces, hyphens and other punctuation are represented by <, except apostrophes, which are skipped. If the names are too long, names are abbreviated to their most significant parts. In that case, the last position must contain an alphabetic character to indicate possible truncation, and if there is a given name, the two fillers and at least one character of it must be included.

Smaller documents such as identity and passport cards are usually in the TD1 size, which is 85.6 × 54.0 mm (3.37 × 2.13 in), the same size as credit cards. The data of the machine-readable zone in a TD1 size card consists of three rows of 30 characters each. The only characters used are A–Z, 0–9 and the filler character <.

Some official travel documents are in the larger TD2 size, 105.0 × 74.0 (4.13 × 2.91 in). They have a layout of the MRZ with two rows of 36 characters each, similar to the TD3 format, but with 31 characters for the name, 7 for the personal number and one less check digit. Yet some official travel documents are in the booklet format with a TD3 identity page.

The format of the first row for TD1 (credit card size) documents is:

The format of the second row is:

1: United States Passport Cards, as of 2011, use this field for the application number that produced the card.

The format of the third row is:

The format of the first row for TD2 (medium size) documents is:

The format of the second row is:

The ICAO Document 9303 part 7 describes machine-readable visas. They come in two different formats:

The format of the first row of the machine-readable zone is:

The format of the second row is:

The ICAO document 9303 part 3 describes specifications common to all Machine Readable Travel Documents.

The dimensions of the effective reading zone (ERZ) is standardized at 17.0 mm (0.67 in) in height with a margin of 3 mm at the document edges and 3.2 mm at the edge against the visual readable part. This is in order to allow use of a single machine reader.

Only characters A to Z (upper case), 0–9, and < (angle bracket) are allowed. The typeface is OCR-B.

The nationality codes shall contain the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code with modifications for all formats. The check digit calculation method is also the same for all formats.

Some values that are different from ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 are used for the issuing country and nationality field:

Other values, which do not have broad acceptance internationally, include:

The check digit calculation is as follows: each position is assigned a value; for the digits 0 to 9 this is the value of the digits, for the letters A to Z this is 10 to 35, for the filler < this is 0. The value of each position is then multiplied by its weight; the weight of the first position is 7, of the second it is 3, and of the third it is 1, and after that the weights repeat 7, 3, 1, and so on. All values are added together and the remainder of the final value divided by 10 is the check digit.

Due to technical limits, characters inside the Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) need to be restricted to the 10 Arabic numerals, the 26 capital Latin letters A through Z, and the filler character <.

Apostrophes and similar punctuation marks have to be omitted, but hyphens and spaces should be replaced by an opening angle bracket. Diacritical marks are not permitted in the MRZ. Even though they may be useful to distinguish names, the use of diacritical marks in the MRZ could confuse machine-reading equipment.

Section 6 of the 9303 part 3 document specifies transliteration of letters outside the A–Z range. It recommends that diacritical marks on Latin letters A-Z are simply omitted (ç → C, ð → D, ê → E, ñ → N etc.), but it allows the following transliterations:

The following transliterations are mandatory:

In Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary and Scandinavia it is standard to use the Å→AA, Ä or Æ→AE, Ö or Ø→OE, Ü→UE, and ß→SS mappings, so Müller becomes MUELLER, Gößmann becomes GOESSMANN, and Hämäläinen becomes HAEMAELAEINEN. ð, ñ and ü occur in Iceland and Spain, but they write them as D, N and U.

Austrian passports may (but do not always) contain a trilingual (in German, English, and French) explanation of the German umlauts and ß, e.g. 'ß' entspricht / is equal to / correspond à 'SS'.

There are also tables for the transliteration of names written using Cyrillic and Arabic scripts, mainly based on transliteration rules into English. For example, the Russian surname Горбачёв ("Gorbatschow" in German, "Gorbatchov" in French, "Gorbachov" in Spanish, "Gorbaczow" in Polish) is transcribed "Gorbachev" in both English and according to the ICAO 9303 rules.

Russian visas (and Russian internal passports since 2011) have a different transliteration into the machine-readable zone. As an example, the letter "ч" is usually transcribed as "ch" in Russian travel documents, however, Russian visas and internal passports use "3" in the machine-readable zone instead. Another example is "Alexei" (travel passport) → "Алексей" (Cyrillic version) → "ALEKSEQ" (machine readable version in an internal document). This makes it easier to transliterate the name back to Cyrillic.

For airline tickets, visas and more, the advice is to only use the first name written in the passport. This is a problem for people who use their second name (as defined by the order in the passport) as their main name in daily speech. It is common, for example in Scandinavia, that the second or even third name is the one defined for daily usage: for example, the actor Hugh Laurie, whose full name is James Hugh Calum Laurie. Swedish travel agents usually book people using the first and daily name if the first one is not their main name, despite advice to use only the first name. If this is too long, the spelling in the MRZ could be used.

For people using a variant of their first name in daily speech, for example the former US president Bill Clinton whose full name is William Jefferson Clinton, the advice is to spell their name as in the passport.

In Scandinavian legislation, middle name is a name placed between given and surname, and is usually a family name. Such names are written as extra surname in the passports. People have been stranded at airports since they entered this extra family name in the "middle name" field in airline booking form, which in English speaking tradition is a given name.

Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Hungarian names might pose a challenge too, since the family name is normally written first. Tickets should use given name and surname as indicated in passports.

This name issue is also an issue for post-Brexit EU women under the Brexit settled status (they have two family names, a birth and marriage name, but only the birth name was used by the passport MRZ and therefore used in the settlement application, although they have been using the married name in UK population register).

ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes are three-letter country codes defined in ISO 3166-1, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to represent countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest. They allow a better visual association between the codes and the country names than the two-letter alpha-2 codes (the third set of codes is numeric and hence offers no visual association). They were first included as part of the ISO 3166 standard in its first edition in 1974.

The ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes are used most prominently in ISO/IEC 7501-1 for machine-readable passports, as standardized by the International Civil Aviation Organization, with a number of additional codes for special passports; some of these codes are currently reserved and not used at the present stage in ISO 3166-1.

The United Nations uses a combination of ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and alpha-3 codes, along with codes that pre-date the creation of ISO 3166, for international vehicle registration codes, which are codes used to identify the issuing country of a vehicle registration plate; some of these codes are currently indeterminately reserved in ISO 3166-1.

The following is a complete list of the current officially assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes, using a title case version of the English short names officially defined by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency (ISO 3166/MA):

User-assigned code elements are codes at the disposal of users who need to add further names of countries, territories, or other geographical entities to their in-house application of ISO 3166-1, and the ISO 3166/MA will never use these codes in the updating process of the standard. The following alpha-3 codes can be user-assigned: AAA to AAZ, QMA to QZZ, XAA to XZZ, and ZZA to ZZZ.

The following codes are used in ISO/IEC 7501-1 for special machine-readable passports:

NATO STANAG 1059 INT is built upon ISO alpha-3 codes, but also defines alpha-2 codes incompatible with ISO 3166-1. It introduces several private use codes for fictional countries and organizational entities:

NATO also continues to use reserved codes for continents:

Reserved code elements are codes which have become obsolete, or are required in order to enable a particular user application of the standard but do not qualify for inclusion in ISO 3166-1. To avoid transitional application problems and to aid users who require specific additional code elements for the functioning of their coding systems, the ISO 3166/MA, when justified, reserves these codes which it undertakes not to use for other than specified purposes during a limited or indeterminate period of time. The reserved alpha-3 codes can be divided into the following four categories: exceptional reservations, transitional reservations, indeterminate reservations, and codes currently agreed not to use.

Exceptionally reserved code elements are codes reserved at the request of national ISO member bodies, governments and international organizations, which are required in order to support a particular application, as specified by the requesting body and limited to such use; any further use of such code elements is subject to approval by the ISO 3166/MA. The following alpha-3 codes are currently exceptionally reserved:

The following alpha-3 codes were previously exceptionally reserved, but are now officially assigned:

Transitional reserved code elements are codes reserved after their deletion from ISO 3166-1. These codes may be used only during a transitional period of at least five years while new code elements that may have replaced them are taken into use. These codes may be reassigned by the ISO 3166/MA after the expiration of the transitional period. The following alpha-3 codes are currently transitionally reserved:

Indeterminately reserved code elements are codes used to designate road vehicles under the 1949 and 1968 United Nations Conventions on Road Traffic but differing from those contained in ISO 3166-1. These code elements are expected eventually to be either eliminated or replaced by code elements within ISO 3166-1. In the meantime, the ISO 3166/MA has reserved such code elements for an indeterminate period. Any use beyond the application of the two Conventions is discouraged and will not be approved by the ISO 3166/MA. Moreover, these codes may be reassigned by the ISO 3166/MA at any time. The following alpha-3 codes are currently indeterminately reserved:

The following alpha-3 code was previously indeterminately reserved, but has been reassigned to another country as its official code:

In addition, the ISO 3166/MA will not use the following alpha-3 codes at the present stage, as they are used in ISO/IEC 7501-1 for special machine-readable passports:

Besides the codes currently transitionally reserved and two other codes currently exceptionally reserved (FXX for France, Metropolitan and SUN for USSR), the following alpha-3 codes have also been deleted from ISO 3166-1:

Users enter passport details in response to a series of questions.

Entering passport details manually can be a source of error. If you need more trust in the data, you could take or upload photo or scan the chip.

Consider whether you need all the information, or just a small amount of it, such as the passport number. Depending on your users or journey, you may find evidence for separating over multiple pages or for including on one page.

You may have also collected some of this information already, such as sex, name and date of birth. You can either:

This pattern could be used as an alternative option if the other patterns do not work for a user.

The captions for the fields in a passport must be translated into English, French or Spanish.

You should make it clear which passport the user needs to enter the information from, because a person may have several.

Allow users to check their answers after manually entering passport details.

If more than 9 characters are entered, say 'Passport number must be 9 characters or less'.

If characters that are not letters or numbers are entered, say 'Passport number must only include numbers and letters a to z'.

The nationality may be shown on the page in full or as a 3 letter code. In the MRZ, nationality is a 3 letter code.

You may label the field as ‘Country of nationality’ instead of ‘Nationality’. There may be advantages and disadvantages to this. You should consider whether or not they are relevant to your service.

The advantages are:

The disadvantages are:

We don’t know whether ‘Country of nationality’ or ‘Nationality’ is easier to understand for people without English as their first language.

If your users are not British or from the international organisations that issue travel and identity documents, we recommend using ‘Country of nationality’. This is because all the options will be countries.

The country of issue field is referred to as the Issuing state or organisation in ICAO, Doc 9303. The standards say that it must be:

We need more evidence for the hint text in this question, what makes it easier for users to find the country of issue in their passport?

The issuing authority is a separate mandatory field, which refers to some organisation within the country of issue. You should ensure you don’t confuse users by referring to ‘authority’ or ‘issuing authority’, when you need the country of issue.

The issue date should be validated to be in the past, using the GOV.UK date input guidance.

All passports have an expiry date.

If you’re capturing current valid passports, then the expiry date should be validated to be in the future, using the using the GOV.UK date input guidance.

Not all countries have a standard 10 year length of passport validity. You may know more about expiry dates from your context, such as if you are collecting UK passport details.

Give users adequate time to find and enter the information. Some users may need extra time to locate and enter the information. See 2.2.1 - Timing adjustable of our accessibility standards.

Consider that users may need more than one method for capturing the information. What do they do if they hit a barrier?

Allow users to check their answers after manually entering passport details. This is both a check of the information, and that they're providing information from the correct passport.

You should try and prevent errors by being as specific as you can about the format of input and where on a passport this information is. We need to improve the hint text for inputs on this pattern.

This pattern is used by:

This pattern needs improving. We need evidence about: