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?