When you intend to send utf8 character data back to the client browser from a cgi script, you really should do this at the very start:

binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
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and make sure that strings coming from the script itself, or from server-side resources (files, database or whatever) are likewise properly flagged as (known to be) utf8 strings.

When you are getting utf8 characters in form data from the client browser, you have to use the Encode module -- decode('utf8',$cgi->param('foo')) -- as indicated in the replies above, so that the parameter value will be treated correctly by perl as a utf8 string.