Django: set_cookie with special characters not working - django

Question

I am using Django 1.11 with Python 3.4 and can not save cookies with a special character.
This problem occurs with the Django build in development server and also on my Apache2 productive server. So I guess this problem is not related to the webserver.
Please see below a very small example with one special character from the Polish alphabet:
def test(request):
response = HttpResponse("ERROR")
response.set_cookie('br_last_name', 'ń')
return respons
And this is the exception which I get:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 138, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 180, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 274, in write
self.send_headers()
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 333, in send_headers
self._write(bytes(self.headers))
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/headers.py", line 142, in __bytes__
return str(self).encode('iso-8859-1')
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u0144' in position 115: ordinal not in range(256)
----------------------------------------
Exception happened during processing of request from ('10.0.2.2', 51996)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 138, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 180, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 274, in write
self.send_headers()
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 333, in send_headers
self._write(bytes(self.headers))
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/headers.py", line 142, in __bytes__
return str(self).encode('iso-8859-1')
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u0144' in position 115: ordinal not in range(256)
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 141, in run
self.handle_error()
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 88, in handle_error
super(ServerHandler, self).handle_error()
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 368, in handle_error
self.finish_response()
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 180, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 274, in write
self.send_headers()
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 331, in send_headers
if not self.origin_server or self.client_is_modern():
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 344, in client_is_modern
return self.environ['SERVER_PROTOCOL'].upper() != 'HTTP/0.9'
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/socketserver.py", line 617, in process_request_thread
self.finish_request(request, client_address)
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/socketserver.py", line 344, in finish_request
self.RequestHandlerClass(request, client_address, self)
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/socketserver.py", line 673, in __init__
self.handle()
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 155, in handle
handler.run(self.server.get_app())
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/handlers.py", line 144, in run
self.close()
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/wsgiref/simple_server.py", line 35, in close
self.status.split(' ',1)[0], self.bytes_sent
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'split'
----------------------------------------