were incorporated into the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989, children's rights advocates were left frustrated, believing that a treaty establishing the fundamental rights of children ought to protect them from all forms of military involvement. To achieve this, a small group of human rights campaigners and sympathetic governments began a global campaign for a new treaty, which was adopted in 2000 as the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict (OPAC). The campaign for a new treaty Initial negotiations By 1994, five years after the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted, children's rights advocates and sympathetic governments had persuaded the international community to establish a working group of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Its mandate was to begin negotiations on a new protocol to the Convention that would raise standards regarding the use of children for military purposes. While the large majority of states negotiating the protocol were willing to end all military recruitment of children under the age of 18 (the so-called "straight-18" principle), a small number were opposed: Bangladesh, Cuba, Israel, South Korea, Kuwait, Pakistan, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US). According to Jo Becker, a human rights advocate actively involved in the negotiations: Governments began a series of annual negotiations in Geneva, but by 1998, negotiations floundered as it became clear that governments that had long used under-eighteens in their national armed forces, notably the United States and United Kingdom, were not willing to support a new standard that conflicted with their national practice. While some of the states opposed to the change said nevertheless that they would not block it, the US insisted on its position, according to Becker. Instrumental in gathering high-level support for the treaty was a proposal by children's rights advocates for a major study on the effect of armed conflict on children. The study was proposed by the Committee on the Rights of the Child, commissioned by the UN General Assembly, and produced by Graça Machel in 1996: Impact of armed conflict on children. The report was particularly concerned with the use of younger children as participants in armed conflict, presenting evidence that many thousands of children were being killed, maimed, and psychiatrically injured around the world every year. It also called for an end to the