Global Administrative Areas

I realize this is a known issue, but I would consider shapefiles with missing accented or otherwise 'non-standard' characters seriously flawed. I'm curious about their omission, as it doesn't seem to be a limitation of the shapefile/dbf format. I have used and created many shapefiles with accents and non-latin characters before, so why are they missing from GADM files? Are there plans for an updated version that include them?