Amazon.com description: Product Description: At a time of escalating global conflict and instability this book examines international efforts to protect children from the effects of war and armed conflict through the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), especially article 38, and the Convention's Optional Protocol on the involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (OPAC). The book examines international efforts to protect children from the effects of war and armed conflict through the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), especially article 38, and the Convention's Optional Protocol on the involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (OPAC). The principal focus of the book is on the existing UN established machinery for implementing the CRC and OPAC - the Committee on the Rights of the Child and its processes for monitoring states' compliance with the CRC and OPAC. The book exposes major shortcoming in the monitoring process and concludes by examining possible ways in which compliance with the CRC and OPAC, and with human rights conventions in general, might be secured more effectively. My book makes both a specific and a general contribution to scholarship on human rights. The specific contribution is the large amount of original data I have compiled on the performance of states in reporting on the CRC and OPAC, on the CRC Committee's handling of those reports, and on the participation and impact of NGOs. The more general contribution lies in the significance of my findings for the UN's entire system for monitoring and promoting human rights. I provide evidence that my findings are part of a more general picture of inadequacy and inefficiency that characterises all of the Human Rights Committees established by the UN to monitor states' compliance with its Human Rights Conventions. Thus, my findings relate to the working, and to the need for reform, of the UN's entire system for promoting and monitoring compliance with human rights. My work has significance not just for scholars working on human rights and the UN, but also for international organisations dealing with human rights in general and with children's rights and armed conflict in particular. It is also significant for UN and EU policy-makers and for grass roots NGOs.