West Papua was created from the western portion of Papua province in February, 2003, initially under the name of Irian Jaya Barat, and was renamed Papua Barat (West Papua) on 2007-02-07. The split remains controversial. In November 2004, an Indonesian court agreed that the split violated Papua's autonomy laws. However, the court ruled that because the new province had already been created, it should remain separate from Papua. The ruling also prohibited the creation of another proposed province, Central Irian Jaya, because the split was not yet completed. As of June, 2008, an ISO 3166-2 code has not yet been published for West Papua. If one were to follow precedent, it would be ID-PB. Note: ISO 3166-2 Newsletter II-1 (corrected 2010-02-19) page 18-19 confirms this as ID-PB. see http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_3166-2_newsletter_ii-1_corrected_2010-02-19.pdf . The code ID-IJ now refers to the larger geographical region including Papua and West Papua.
