diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index cd06bdbc..fa52fb86 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -4,6 +4,9 @@ summary: Timeline of guardrail helper changes mirrored from Sweetistics and rela
 
 # Changelog
 
+## 2026-07-02 — UTF-8 Skill Validation
+- Made skill validation explicitly read UTF-8 so C locales accept non-ASCII skill front matter. Thanks @chaochaoweb3.
+
 ## 2026-07-02 — Orchestrator Ownership
 - Kept `maintainer-orchestrator` skill maintenance in the root orchestration session and enforced exactly one Codex app thread per project, removing project-to-task thread fan-out including the OpenClaw exception.
 
diff --git a/scripts/validate-skills b/scripts/validate-skills
index 4d8e1fc8..6e4904cc 100755
--- a/scripts/validate-skills
+++ b/scripts/validate-skills
@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@ errors = []
 names = {}
 
 skill_files.each do |path|
-  text = File.read(path)
+  text = File.read(path, encoding: "UTF-8")
   data, error = load_front_matter(path, text)
 
   if error