So the ``UnicodeDecodeError`` can happen during a ``decode``, and this is explained here: http://wiki.python.org/moin/UnicodeDecodeError

However, I was wrong in saying that ``suds`` is unable to handle unicode characters: it is unable to encode them to ascii if they are not decoded as utf-8 first, but if it is a utf-8 string, then it seems it handles them just fine. I am thus simply decoding the string to utf-8 now.