UTF-8 encoding works "as is" based on byte strings (char[]). The latest versions of the draft standard provide somewhat more support.
I recommend heading toward a future where only UTF-8 encoding is used for multibyte characters and UCS-2 or similar for wchar_t. There is no need to support several different encodings.
UCS-2 is a bad choice -- it fails to represent most unicode characters. If you meant UTF-16, that's also a bad choice, because UTF-16 is also a variable width encoding, forcing programmers to use a some for of "extra-wide char".
I'm of the opinion that wchar_t should become an alias for char32_t.
