convert Unicode to lower/uppercase?

[Hallvard B Furuseth (nospam nospam)]

Has someone got a Python routine or module which converts Unicode
strings to lowercase (or uppercase)?

What I actually need to do is to compare a number of strings in a
case-insensitive manner, so I assume it's simplest to convert to
lower/upper first.

Possibly all strings will be from the latin-1 character set, so I could
convert to 8-bit latin-1, map to lowercase, and convert back, but that
seems rather cumbersome.

-- 
Hallvard