Special characters in title-attributes

I'm having a serious problem with special characters in title-attributes.
For example:

<abbr title="financiële instelling">fi</abbr>

is after submitting to the database and retrieving it back
changed into:

<abbr title="financiële instelling">fi</abbr>

The same hapens when I try to enter ë
Everything is switched to UTF-8 here, so that could not be the problem.

Please, could anyone help me?