A/HRC/22/59 medication is no longer available, they said, and children requiring complex or continuous treatment face serious difficulties. F. The use of children in hostilities 24. When Syria acceded to the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict in 2003, it made a declaration which said that the enlistment of under-18s was prohibited. The draft Military Law (1953), which regulates recruitment, states that males are liable for recruitment in the year that they reach the age of 19. Before the conflict began, prospective conscripts would present themselves to local conscription offices to collect their military service papers on reaching 18. Within 12 months, these conscripts would join different units after a medical examination, for 21 or 24 months of compulsory service. Today, official conscription systems are disintegrating, at the same time that the Government’s need for military personnel becomes ever more urgent. The Government’s approaches to addressing this need for soldiers may lead it to disregard formerly well-established age distinctions. 25. With many young men evading official conscription systems, the Government is enlisting young men arrested at checkpoints or during attacks on civilian areas. As Government control over Syrian territory shrinks, checkpoints play ever more important roles in the relationship between Government and people. Interviewees from rural Dara’a said that security forces check payment of water and electricity bills at checkpoints. Security forces sometimes separate very young children from their parents and ask them leading questions, such as “What do you think of President Bashar Al-Assad?” Checkpoints have become part of the conscription system in areas where Government control is tenuous. A 19 year old evading conscription said that he was subjected to humiliating treatment in checkpoints in the Dara’a area. Another interviewee said that boys aged 12 and over would face such harassment. One woman with a well-built 14 year old son said that he would be questioned about conscription at each of the checkpoints separating her village from Dara’a city. 26. Some (but not all) interviewees believed that this method of recruitment was bringing under-18s into the Syrian armed forces. A defector from Dara’a stated: “They arrest youth aged from 16–18 at the checkpoints ... They take them to the military security branch in Dara’a and then they beat them up. Some of them who have problems [with the authorities] are taken to Air Force Intelligence where they may be detained or liquidated. If you’re not proved to have taken part in the events, they take you to the army. They take you to the [local branch of the] military police … to the military conscription department, and they send you to distant governorates. That [new] system started from the beginning of the events. Military service was from 18, now it’s anyone who turns up at checkpoints.” Other defectors stated that leaving the army had never been an easy task, and was now practically impossible, so great was the need for soldiers. 27. The Government’s establishment of militia is linked to its need for military personnel. These militia are often drawn from sectarian constituencies. They use a mix of sectarian affiliation, kinship systems and ready cash to fill their ranks. This may lead to the recruitment of under-age soldiers. 28. The Government’s different affiliated militia are not always easy to distinguish from each other. Popular Committees are often seen as local, self-defence groups formed in Government-aligned neighbourhoods. They are sometimes conflated with Shabbiha, although that term is sometimes associated with harsh, muscled fighters drawn from the core of the security apparatus or the Government’s most trusted sectarian constituencies, rather than from under-age youth. The evidence suggests that both these groups are using children for active participation in hostilities. GE.13-10627 83