government faced international criticism for delaying his repatriation. Khadr was eventually transferred to the Canadian prison system in September 2012 and was freed on bail by a judge in Alberta in May 2015. , Khadr was appealing his US conviction as a war criminal. Before sentencing the Special Representative to the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict wrote to the US military commission at Guantanamo appealing unsuccessfully for Khadr's release into a rehabilitation program. In her letter she said that Khadr represented the "classic child soldier narrative: recruited by unscrupulous groups to undertake actions at the bidding of adults to fight battles they barely understand". The role of the United Nations Background Children's rights advocates were left frustrated after the final text of the convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) did not prohibit the military recruitment of all children under the age of 18, and they began to call for a new treaty to achieve this goal. As a consequence the newly formed Committee on the Rights of the Child made two recommendations: first, to request a major UN study into the impact of armed conflict on children; and second, to establish a working group of the UN Commission on Human Rights to negotiate a supplementary protocol to the convention. Both proposals were accepted. Responding to the committee on the Rights of the Child, the UN General Assembly acknowledged "the grievous deterioration in the situation of children in many parts of the world as a result of armed conflicts" and commissioned the human rights expert Graça Machel to conduct a major fact-finding study. Her report, Impact of Armed Conflict on Children (1996), was particularly concerned with the military use of younger children, which was killing, maiming, and psychiatrically injuring many thousands every year. It noted: Meanwhile, the UN Commission on Human Rights established a working group to negotiate a treaty to raise the legal standard. After a global campaign and complex negotiations, the new treaty was agreed in 2000 as the Optional Protocol to the convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. The treaty prohibited the direct participation of all children in armed conflict for the first time, while continuing to allow state armed forces (though not non-state armed groups) to recruit children from age 16. The protocol came into force on 12 February 2002. Special Representative of the