Svalbard and Jan Mayen is a statistical designation defined by ISO 3166-1 for a collective grouping of two remote jurisdictions of Norway: Svalbard and Jan Mayen. While the two are combined for the purposes of the International Organization for Standardization category, they are not administratively related. This has further resulted in the country code top-level domain.sj being issued for Svalbard and Jan Mayen, and. The United Nations Statistics Division also uses this code, but has named it Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands. Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean under the sovereignty of Norway, but is subject to the special status granted by the Svalbard Treaty. Jan Mayen is a remote island in the Arctic Ocean; it has no permanent population and is administrated by the County Governor of Nordland. Svalbard and Jan Mayen have in common that they are the only integrated parts of Norway not allocated to counties. While a separate ISO code for Svalbard was proposed by the United Nations, it was the Norwegian authorities who took initiative to include Jan Mayen in the code. Its official language is Norwegian.
Jan Mayen is a volcanic island in the Arctic Ocean located at the border of the Norwegian Sea and the Greenland Sea. The single island covers an area of and is dominated by the tall Beerenberg volcano. The island's only population is a combined military and meteorological outpost that operates a LORAN-C transmitter at Olonkinbyen. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute annexed the island for Norway in 1922. On 27 February 1930, the island was made de jure a part of the Kingdom of Norway. Since 1994, the island has been administrated by the County Governor of Nordland, with some authority delegated to the station commander.
Application
The ISO designation is congruent with an equivalent United Nations Statistics Division category and users of these classification systems may in some cases report separately for "Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands" instead of rolling up this information into the "Norway" category. Neither Svalbard nor Jan Mayen have their own flag or coat of arms, and the flag of Norway is used for both of them, both alone and as a group. An attempt to change the ISO code to just "Svalbard" has previously failed because of opposition from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, for statistics use within population and trade, "Svalbard and Jan Mayen" essentially means just "Svalbard".
ISO 3166-2:SJ is the entry for Svalbard and Jan Mayen in ISO 3166-2, a system for assigning codes to subnational administrative divisions. However, further subdivision for Svalbard and Jan Mayen occurs under Norway's entry, :
By virtue of the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code SJ, Svalbard and Jan Mayen were grouped together and allocated the Internet country codetop-level domain.sj. Norid, who also administrated the Norway's .no ccTLD, was given the responsibility for the.sj and Bouvet Island's .bv domain in 1997. Policy prohibits any registration with either of the domains, as institutions connected to Svalbard can use the .no domain. Norwegian authorities do not want to commercialize the domain resources, and therefore .sj will not be sold to a third party.
