diff --git a/cinder/utils.py b/cinder/utils.py
index 7be1a5732..8f14a48a8 100644
--- a/cinder/utils.py
+++ b/cinder/utils.py
@@ -824,7 +824,7 @@ def convert_str(text):
     * convert to Unicode on Python 3: decode bytes from UTF-8
     """
     if six.PY2:
-        return encodeutils.safe_encode(text)
+        return encodeutils.to_utf8(text)
     else:
         if isinstance(text, bytes):
             return text.decode('utf-8')