diff --git a/src/fcrepo/connection.py b/src/fcrepo/connection.py
index 454a15f..f020204 100644
--- a/src/fcrepo/connection.py
+++ b/src/fcrepo/connection.py
@@ -78,8 +78,6 @@ def open(self, url, body='', headers=None, method='GET',):
             try:
                 logging.debug('Trying %s on %s' % (method, url))
                 #we can't have unicode characters floating around in the body
-                if isinstance(body, basestring):
-                    body=body.encode('ascii','xmlcharrefreplace')
                 self.conn.request(method, url, body, headers)
                 return check_response_status(self.conn.getresponse())
             except (socket.error,
diff --git a/src/fcrepo/wadl.py b/src/fcrepo/wadl.py
index cfcba4b..cd8b52e 100644
--- a/src/fcrepo/wadl.py
+++ b/src/fcrepo/wadl.py
@@ -71,6 +71,11 @@ def submit(self, body='', **params):
         for param, value in self.undocumented_params.items():
             if not param in qs:
                 qs[param] = value
+        
+        #change to utf8 to let unicode pass through urlencode
+        for key in qs:
+            qs[key] = qs[key].encode('utf8')
+
         if qs:
             self.url = '%s?%s' % (self.url, urllib.urlencode(qs))