Libxml2 and special characters

[Kaneza Innocent]

Hi,
i have a serious problem of sending special characters such as french 
accents and so on like if i want to send é,è, ç, and others they dont pass. 
is it a Libxml2 problem or what? i do specify that the encoding is UTF-8 but 
still the problem persist.
I am using two different versions of kannel tha stable 1.4.1 and the cvs 
build 20070226 and using libxml2

Thanks

Kaneza