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he government’s attempts to deny the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in the country with the world’s largest Muslim population has now been taken to the global stage.

Indonesia has joined a group of 17 countries, including of conservative countries like Saudi Arabia, to block a plan to include the rights of LGBT communities in a new urban strategy drawn up by the UN.

The plan, aiming to acknowledge homophobia, was initiated by Canada and backed by the European Union, the US and Mexico. It is due to be finalized at a major UN conference in Ecuador next week.

The UN’s ‘‘New Urban Agenda’’ is a non-binding agreement to address the challenges of rapidly growing cities globally and will be adopted at Habitat III in Quito, setting out guidelines for sustainable urban development over the next 20 years.

The recognition of LGBT communities and an acknowledgment of homophobia would be seen as a significant step by the UN with same sex relationships illegal in 76 countries around the world and punishable by death in at least seven.

However, Indonesia decided to block the plan as it is against the country’s religious and moral norms, the Foreign Ministry said.

“Our constitution guarantees that no one is discriminated. In ensuring the rights in accordance to our constitution, we also have to respect religious values and social norms,” the ministry’s spokesman Arrmanatha Nasir told The Jakarta Post.

He insisted that the government had no intention to discriminate the LGBT community. “We’re not discriminating,” he said.

This is not the first time Indonesia has taken its fight against LGBT people to the international arena.

In June, Indonesia, along with 17 other countries, voted against the resolution on “violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI)”, which was adopted at the 32nd Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Human Rights Working Group (HRWG) executive director Muhammad Hafiz said the Indonesian government had been getting more active in opposing LGBT rights recently.

The activist said Indonesia’s foreign diplomacy stance on LGBT people is a reflection of the country’s current situation, where the entire LGBT community suffers from officially sanctioned public persecution, which the state started through numerous anti-gay statements made by public officials.

The increasingly hateful rhetoric shows no sign of abating.

By openly persecuting LGBT people, the government and conservatives are trying to create a moralistic, religious state, he said.

“If the government wants to use religious and moral reasoning to base its policy on, then it’s not a problem. But have they discussed it with the public? Has it become a general consensus?” Hafiz said.

Since there is no consensus on the matter yet, the Indonesian government should then not have used the religion card when it talked about LGBT issues in the global forum, he said.