Regression: Unicode characters not rendered in table cells

After upgrading the maven-site-plugin from version 2.0.1 to 2.3, I noticed that one of my APT files in which unicode characters are used is no longer rendered correctly to HTML. More precisely, in the APT file there are several occurrences of

\u2713

The generated HTML file then contains

 u2713

rather than

✓

I do not have a minimal example attached, but it should be easily reproducible using Maven 2.2.1 and site plugin 2.3 (you might also want to try with 2.0.1 where it works for me).