Hmm, it works for me.  Maybe your locale is funny.  I get:

  $ python -c 'import libbe.util.encoding as e;
               import libbe.ui.util.pager as p;
               print e.get_encoding();
               p.run_pager();
               print e.get_encoding()'
  UTF-8
  UTF-8

but perhaps you're getting ISO-8859-1 for one of those?