Implementation of the Constitutional Obligation of the State to Ensure Access to Justice in the Context of Digital Technologies Development

Abstract

The paper shows that ensuring access to justice is enshrined in the constitutions of most UN member states. The specificity of the Russian constitutional norm lies in the fact that ensuring access to justice for victims of crimes is imposed on the state as its duty. In criminal proceedings, this obligation is realized through the activities of the preliminary investigation bodies, the prosecutor, and the court. The author proposes measures aimed at building pre-trial proceedings that effectively ensure access to justice: refusal from the stage of initiation of a criminal case and indicating the preliminary investigation from the moment of registration of a crime report; empowering the prosecutor to initiate criminal proceedings, direct investigations and bring charges; expansion of judicial control in pre-trial proceedings; development of effective simplified and accelerated procedures in preliminary production; supplementing the grounds for termination of a criminal case, criminal prosecution by the inexpediency of criminal prosecution. It is shown that the introduction of digital technologies in the criminal process, including the establishment of digital interaction between state bodies and the population through a single secure digital online platform, should become an independent direction for improving pre-trial proceedings; creation of a mechanism for filing a crime report through a special online service; automatic registration of applications and determination of the direction of their movement using the capabilities of artificial intelligence; introduction of an electronic criminal case; use of semantic neural networks, computer vision, data clustering, etc. in the criminal process.