diff --git a/pdfx/backends.py b/pdfx/backends.py
index 94d9053..f94da98 100644
--- a/pdfx/backends.py
+++ b/pdfx/backends.py
@@ -302,7 +302,11 @@ def resolve_PDFObjRef(self, obj_ref):
 
             if "URI" in obj_resolved["A"]:
                 # print("->", a["A"]["URI"])
-                return Reference(obj_resolved["A"]["URI"].decode("utf-8"), self.curpage)
+                try:
+                    reference = Reference(obj_resolved["A"]["URI"].decode("utf-8"), self.curpage)
+                except:
+                    reference = Reference(obj_resolved["A"]["URI"].decode("ISO-8859-1"), self.curpage)
+                return reference
 
 
 class TextBackend(ReaderBackend):