How can I put a URL containing a plus into JiraIssues Macro?

[Winter, Jan Hendrik AVL/DE]

Hi all,

I'm currently developing some Python scripts that read issues from Jira, create metrics and write them to Confluence. A part of the Confluence page is that I use Wiki markup to create a Jira filter, as shown here:

{jiraissues:columns=Key;Summary;Status;|url=https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/?jql=SOME_JQL_CONTAINING_A_PLUS}

The problem is if the URL contains a plus I get the following error message:

I've gone a bit on track and when I open the link I see that the plus (%2B) is replaced by a space (%20 ). I made sure that the URL worked before I passed it to the Confluence REST API.  If I copy the URL from debugging manually to the Confluence page it also works fine. Only if I write the page through the REST API it won't work.  

Any ideas on how to solve this?