"this violates all reasonable definitions of a good primary key"
Could you please elaborate more about how it violates the PK definition ?

+ AFAIK, and looking to JPA 2.1 specification and Hibernate Guide, I can't see any violation of the primary key used for the entity [Country].

+ Using JPQL, I get my entity with correct case whatever the case of the string argument? so why not to get the same behavior using [*EntityManager.Find*] method?