Encode each value in the list to a string:

[x.encode('UTF8') for x in EmployeeList]

You need to pick a valid encoding; don't use str() as that'll use the system default (for Python 2 that's ASCII) which will not encode all possible codepoints in a Unicode value.

UTF-8 is capable of encoding all of the Unicode standard, but any codepoint outside the ASCII range will lead to multiple bytes per character.

However, if all you want to do is test for a specific string, test for a unicode string and Python won't have to auto-encode all values when testing for that:

u'1001' in EmployeeList.values()

Every codepoint has a name, so you are effectively asking for the Unicode standard list of codepoint names (as well as the *list of name aliases, supported by Python 3.3 and up).

Each Python version supports a specific version of the Unicode standard; the unicodedata.unidata_version attribute tells you which one for a given Python runtime. The above links lead to the latest published Unicode version, replace UCD/latest in the URLs with the value of unicodedata.unidata_version for your Python version.

Per codepoint, the unicodedata.name() function can tell you the official name, and unicodedata.lookup() gives you the inverse (name to codepoint).

try applying unicode to its elements

>>> lst=['Justice league', 'Avenger']
>>> map(unicode,lst)
[u'Justice league', u'Avenger']

Obviously we are talking about Python 2 only, since literal strings are unicode by default in Python 3

Have a look at this Q&A on the same subject

>>> import sys
>>> lst = [u'\u5de5', u'\u5de5']
>>> msg = repr([x.encode(sys.stdout.encoding) for x in lst]).decode('string-escape')
>>> print msg
['工', '工']

You could use ast.literal_eval function.

>>> import ast
>>> s = u"['1', '2', '2', '1', '2']"
>>> list(map(int, ast.literal_eval(s)))
[1, 2, 2, 1, 2]

OR

>>> [int(i) for i in ast.literal_eval(s)]
[1, 2, 2, 1, 2]

You can decode those Unicode escape sequences with .decode('unicode-escape'). However, .decode is a bytes method, so if those sequences are text rather than bytes you first need to encode them into bytes. Alternatively, you can (probably) open your CSV file in binary mode in order to read those sequences as bytes rather than as text strings.

Just for fun, I'll also use unicodedata to get the names of those emojis.

import unicodedata as ud

emojis = [
    '\\U0001F600',
    '\\U0001F601',
    '\\U0001F602',
    '\\U0001F923',
]

for u in emojis:
    s = u.encode('ASCII').decode('unicode-escape')
    print(u, ud.name(s), s)

output

\U0001F600 GRINNING FACE 😀
\U0001F601 GRINNING FACE WITH SMILING EYES 😁
\U0001F602 FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY 😂
\U0001F923 ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING 🤣

This should be much faster than using ast.literal_eval. And if you read the data in binary mode it will be even faster since it avoids the initial decoding step while reading the file, as well as allowing you to eliminate the .encode('ASCII') call.

You can make the decoding a little more robust by using

u.encode('Latin1').decode('unicode-escape')

but that shouldn't be necessary for your emoji data. And as I said earlier, it would be even better if you open the file in binary mode to avoid the need to encode it.