Newly agreed United Nations Sustainable Development Goals will make no mention of abortion or gay rights including gay marriage, despite strong lobbying by some nations.

Following protracted negotiations towards the final content of ‘Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ by which the UN will operate its development activities worldwide, UN member states agreed to drop elements that would have seen abortion included as a ‘development goal’ alongside a requirement on states to gay marriage, regardless of voter sentiment on such issues. Instead, consensus was reached that the issues would be dealt via already standing agreements or via national parliaments.

Despite an insistence as far back as last September from Amina Mohammed , a Nigerian development expert who led the working group drafting the new UN goals, that issues such as gay rights had no place in development policy, a stance backed by numerous governments, the push for LGBT rights continued into 2015, with Britain’s ambassador to the UN insisting that such rights would ultimately be part of the agreed goals.

In some countries homosexual conduct is still against the law and homosexuals can be severely persecuted.

The 17 new development goals agreed, touching on areas of health, education, climate change and economic development, are the result of three years of negotiation between the 193 member states of the UN. Those negotiations were moderated, since 2014, by Ireland’s UN Ambassador David Donoghue and Kenya’s Ambassador Macharia Kamau.

The provision of ‘Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ will be formally adopted during the Sustainable Development Summit in New York this September.