It seems that browsers do a form POST in the charset that the page was encoded in. Modifying form.jsp in solr/admin seems to work... the data comes across encoded in UTF8.
The problem is that the charset isn't defined to be UTF-8 in the headers, so the bytes are assumed to be latin-1. Is this a problem we can fix in solr, or is it purely container config? This will mimic what the browser sends back: curl -i http://localhost:8983/solr/select -d 'q=%C3%AA' -Yonik