My application deployed on Tomcat 7 needs to be able to handle non-latin characters properly in get queries properly, to do this I have to add URIEncoding="UTF-8" to the server.xml file.
<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
connectionTimeout="20000"
redirectPort="8443"
URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>
then restart Tomcat, and this works.
But how do I do this or equivalent when using Amazon Web Services and Elastic Beanstalk