http://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html first says that Unicode input is not supported then seems to suggest that UTF-8 is supported. Since the UTF-8 encoding supports all of unicode, it's not clear what is meant by saying it doesn't support unicode. Perhaps it means that there is some specific encoding for unicode that is not supported (UCS-2, UTF-16)?
Can the documentation be updated to differentiate more carefully between unicode and the encodings that implement it, and to specify which encodings are not supported?