We already set the character set for the C API. The strings coming from it should be UTF-8.

I can't reproduce your issue:

Python 3.4.1 (default, Jul 27 2014, 17:47:19) 
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import GeoIP
>>> GeoIP.country_names['CW']
'Curacao'

What version of the libGeoIP are you using? If any of those methods are returning ISO-8859-1, it sounds like it would be a bug in libGeoIP.

I took a closer look at the code in question, and I think the right fix is to populate from the UTF-8 country name array in libGeoIP.

My system details:

Python 3.4.1 (default, Aug 21 2014, 16:21:32) 
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import GeoIP
>>> GeoIP.lib_version()
'1.4.8'

$ uname -a
Linux linuxhost 3.4.79 #6 SMP PREEMPT Fri Feb 14 23:58:54 CST 2014 armv7l GNU/Linux

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

$ cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 7 \n \l

My fixed version of GeoIP prints 'Curaçao' and your output is 'Curacao'. 5th chars are different.
Also when I use unfixed version of GeoIP in python 2.7, print skips 5th char in my locale:

Python 2.7.3 (default, Mar 14 2014, 17:55:54) 
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import GeoIP
>>> GeoIP.country_names['CW']
'Cura\xe7ao'
>>> print GeoIP.country_names['CW']
Curao

I pushed updates. Now the code uses GeoIP_utf8_country_name for populating of dictionary.

Thanks. I merged this. I did change it to use GeoIP_country_name for Python 2 since people may be expecting latin1 there.

I also release 1.3.2 with this fix.