diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 237c251d8f..d31645acf1 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -13,6 +13,7 @@
  * Deprecate Pig support (CASSANDRA-10542)
  * Reduce contention getting instances of CompositeType (CASSANDRA-10433)
 Merged from 2.1:
+ * Force encoding when computing statement ids (CASSANDRA-10755)
  * Properly reject counters as map keys (CASSANDRA-10760)
  * Fix the sstable-needs-cleanup check (CASSANDRA-10740)
  * (cqlsh) Print column names before COPY operation (CASSANDRA-8935)
diff --git a/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/utils/MD5Digest.java b/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/utils/MD5Digest.java
index 3f4645803a..2dc57de82e 100644
--- a/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/utils/MD5Digest.java
+++ b/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/utils/MD5Digest.java
@@ -17,6 +17,7 @@
  */
 package org.apache.cassandra.utils;
 
+import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
 import java.util.Arrays;
 
 /**
@@ -50,7 +51,14 @@ public class MD5Digest
 
     public static MD5Digest compute(String toHash)
     {
-        return compute(toHash.getBytes());
+        try
+        {
+            return compute(toHash.getBytes("UTF-8"));
+        }
+        catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e)
+        {
+            throw new RuntimeException(e.getMessage());
+        }
     }
 
     @Override