ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an assessment of important policy developments at the United Nations level from discussion of supranational and regional international approaches to combat Internet child pornography at the European Union and Council of Europe levels. Concerns regarding child pornography and its availability and distribution through the Internet at the UN level led to the drafting of an Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child in the late 1990s by the Commission on Human Rights. The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography declares that state parties to the Optional Protocol are 'gravely concerned at the significant and increasing international traffic in children for the purpose of the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography'.
