Issue can be found only in 2.7, in 2.6.6 it works

System:
    Linux strix 3.2.14-1-ARCH x86_64
Python information:
    Python 2.7.2 (default, Jan 31 2012, 13:19:49) [GCC 4.6.2 20120120 (prerelease)] on linux2

Snippet to reproduce error:

# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
import urllib2

request = urllib2.Request('http://google.com', u'Контент', {'Content-Type': 'text/plain; charset=utf-8'})
urllib2.urlopen(request).read()

Stacktrace:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 126, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 394, in open
    response = self._open(req, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 412, in _open
    '_open', req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 372, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1199, in http_open
    return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPConnection, req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1168, in do_open
    h.request(req.get_method(), req.get_selector(), req.data, headers)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 955, in request
    self._send_request(method, url, body, headers)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 989, in _send_request
    self.endheaders(body)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 951, in endheaders
    self._send_output(message_body)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 815, in _send_output
    self.send(message_body)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 787, in send
    self.sock.sendall(data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/socket.py", line 224, in meth
    return getattr(self._sock,name)(*args)

# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
import urllib2

request = urllib2.Request('http://google.com', u'Контент'.encode("utf-8"), {'Content-Type': 'text/plain; charset=utf-8'})
urllib2.urlopen(request).read()

Sorry. My fault