Cuba
Practice Relating to Rule 136. Recruitment of Child Soldiers
In 2009, in its second periodic report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, Cuba stated:
62. Law 75/94 (National Defence Act) and Decree-Law 224/2001 (dealing with military service) provide that in the year male citizens turn 16 they are obliged to come forward and formally enrol in the military register. T[hey] [t]hen begin the preparation, specialist military training and prevention, care and medical activities that are the prelude to recruitment.
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64. These laws also establish that the minimum age for call-up to military service is 18, while people wishing to enlist voluntarily in the armed forces must wait until the year of their seventeenth birthday. …
65. Adolescents have the option of working out their term of military service by performing duties of other kinds, which may be economic or social in character.