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 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. The 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.