diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index e8eab869ce0..832f7dfb817 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -12,6 +12,8 @@ What's New in Python 2.6.6 alpha 1?
 Core and Builtins
 -----------------
 
+- Issue #9058: Remove assertions about INT_MAX in UnicodeDecodeError.
+
 - Issue #8941: decoding big endian UTF-32 data in UCS-2 builds could crash
   the interpreter with characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane
   (higher than 0x10000).
diff --git a/Objects/exceptions.c b/Objects/exceptions.c
index af67cc7b0cc..a0d7b536a19 100644
--- a/Objects/exceptions.c
+++ b/Objects/exceptions.c
@@ -1785,9 +1785,6 @@ PyUnicodeDecodeError_Create(
     const char *encoding, const char *object, Py_ssize_t length,
     Py_ssize_t start, Py_ssize_t end, const char *reason)
 {
-    assert(length < INT_MAX);
-    assert(start < INT_MAX);
-    assert(end < INT_MAX);
     return PyObject_CallFunction(PyExc_UnicodeDecodeError, "ss#nns",
                                  encoding, object, length, start, end, reason);
 }