The Role of Legal Clinics in Ensuring Access to Justice

Abstract

The article is devoted to topical issues of legal clinics at higher education institutions in the field of access to justice. The authors summarized the approaches that exist in the scientific legal literature regarding the definition of the concepts of «justice», «access to justice», «the right to judicial protection». It was determined that the legal elements of access to justice constitute legitimacy and ensure its general existence; material and technical elements determine the conditions necessary for the execution of justice by all participants included in its personal element, that is, it provides conditions for real and potential participants in the judicial process. The authors proved that the right to legal protection is a complex category and carries a narrower burden than «legal protection» itself.
Prospects for legal clinics to act as mediators (representatives) in ensuring access to justice were formulated in accordance with the current legislation.
Special attention was also paid in the conducted research to the issues of access to justice in the conditions of the imposed martial law and the problems of access to free legal aid and to the instruments of judicial protection of violated rights and interests in the temporarily occupied territories. Attention is focused on what needs to be revised in the Standard Regulation on the legal clinic of a higher educational institution of Ukraine in accordance with the existing realities.
On the basis of the analysis carried out by the authors of the article, conclusions were drawn that made it possible to determine the role of legal clinics in ensuring access to justice during martial law in a functional aspect, namely to indicate that the legal clinic can fulfill the role of an intermediary between the subjects of the appeal on the one hand and the court from the other. One of the significant levers that affect access to justice is determined to be sufficiently high costs of consultation and representation, which hinder the representation of parties in court proceedings, other obstacles also complicate access to justice, such as limited access to legal information, as well as other restrictions (especially in the period of armed military aggression).