Violence and other harmful practices start early in children’s lives and take place in environments designed to ensure safety. In Africa, 40 percent of all girls are married before their 18th birthday and two out of three children in Latin America and the Caribbean are regularly subjected to violent discipline at home. Eradicating this violence is an obligation of 196 states in the world, which gave rise to the question of whether there are gaps in the international law protection of children’s rights. This paper aims to critically examine the international law protection of the right of the child to freedom from violence and harmful practices. My thesis is that there is a lack of protection under international law, which results in children on different continents being protected differently. The examination takes its starting point from the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the prohibitions against corporal punishment (article 19) and child marriage (article 24.3) established therein. Thereafter the question is whether there are provisions in the regional human rights instruments on those continents that today have an established protection for human rights that sufficiently correspond to their content. To illustrate how well the international law protection works in practice two practical examples from respective continent are given prominence to. Here it begins to emerge that there are a number of societal obstacles for articles 19 and 24(3) in CRC to have full impact in practice, such as cultural values and pluralistic legal systems that give primacy to religious laws. These are obstacles that extend beyond the deficiencies in the international law protection and thus threaten the realization even of the standards that satisfactorily protect children from violence and harmful practices. My thesis can be answered as follows; there are shortcomings in the international law protection of the right of the child to freedom from violence and harmful practices, which to a certain extent results in children on different continents being protected differently. For example, neither the european nor the inter-american standard regarding child marriage lives up to that of the CRC. The real shortcoming, however, lies in the failure of states to “honestly” fulfill their obligations under international law, which results in even children on the same continent but in different countries being protected differently. / <p>Betyg: AB</p>