In which case the problem is with the government (that already supports French symbols, mind), not with the person hoping to have sensible support for names.
Of course the problem is with the government. That's not my point.
My point is that there are plenty of reasons why this kind of name is not supported. Besides the legacy computing reasons, having a name that only a handful of people in the whole world could spell out is going to cause problems.
Fixing this problem would cost real money that could be used on other things. Perhaps the indigenous community should be consulted on their most pressing issues before enshrining the right to have these characters in a business name.
I'm guessing the system was built to handle extended (8-bit) ascii, which contains the accented French characters. Upgrading a system of this size (and potentially many other systems it needs to trade information with) to support UTF-8 would be a very large undertaking.
It should have been built to support UTF-8 in the first place and should be upgraded, but the time it will take to do that will not help this person. With any luck, it may help someone else in the future though.
