Access to justice in the reformed judicial and verification stages of the criminal proceedings

The study deals with one of the pivotal conditions for ensuring the judicial protection, i.e. the right of citizens to access to justice in the higher courts that verify and review the criminal judgments. The author proposes an original definition of the citizens’ access to justice including, among other things, the unhindered possibility to obtain judicial protection in the higher courts. The research analyzes the key points of the forthcoming reform in the courts of appeal and cassation introduced by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. Besides, it evaluates the security guarantee for the right of citizens to access to justice in the new federal judicial institutions. The court hearings arranged with the help of videoconference can be the possible problems of limiting access to justice. Nevertheless, the author argues that it is necessary to expand the statutory regulation of such trials by creating an additional criminal procedural regulation within the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation.