Unfortunately, you're wrong here. This is from BBC, and they're using a very peculiar and annoying British-ism where they refer to an entity in the plural sense. They do it all the time with companies, saying something like "[Company] have announced earnings" instead of "[Company] has announced earnings" as in American English. Their reasoning is that the company (or country in this case) is composed of many people, so you should use plural. But it's awkward-sounding and annoying, and really doesn't make sense. An individual person is composed of billions of cells, but we don't refer to him or her with the plural tense.