Institute of Defense at the Present Stage of Development of Criminal Justice in Russia

The article examines some procedural issues of the participation of the defender in the criminal proceedings, the problems of compliance with the principle of adversarial parties at all stages of criminal proceedings. A clear discrepancy between the rights of the parties to the prosecution and the defense at the pretrial stages of the criminal process was established. Since all key decisions on the movement of a criminal case (suspension of a criminal case, bringing a person as an accused, termination of a criminal case, issuing an indictment, an indictment or an indictment, etc.) are made by the investigator, the inquirer, who belong to the prosecution, and the defense lawyer can practically have no influence on these decisions. In addition, in Russian criminal proceedings, the defender still does not have the right to collect evidence along with the investigator, the inquirer. In addition, the authors of the article consider the actual issue of providing legal assistance to persons who do not have the financial capacity to pay for a lawyer. The article notes that the intervention of the competent authorities in the case of inadequate assistance of the defender is required only when the free-appointed defender has shown a clear inability to provide effective assistance. Special attention is paid to such a concept as “attorney-client privilege”. It has been determined that advocate secrecy in criminal proceedings is absolute, which is currently unacceptable for Russian reality. It is proposed to introduce certain amendments to the current legislation of Russia, which will help to increase guarantees for the implementation of the institution of protection in criminal proceedings.