I'd note the following passage from the LDAP v3 spec (RFC 2251)...
The LDAPString is a notational convenience to indicate that, although
strings of LDAPString type encode as OCTET STRING types, the ISO
10646 [13] character set (a superset of Unicode) is used, encoded
following the UTF-8 algorithm [14]. Note that in the UTF-8 algorithm
characters which are the same as ASCII (0x0000 through 0x007F) are
represented as that same ASCII character in a single byte. The other
byte values are used to form a variable-length encoding of an
arbitrary character.
LDAPString ::= OCTET STRING
The definition in the ess-02 document is aligned with this, and appears
appropriate.
Bruce