This article reveals the essence of the protection function, which is one of the functions of the criminal process, its importance as a direction of criminal proceedings, the concept of the right to protection arising from the implementation of this function. A controversy is conducted with the scientific and theoretical views of national and foreign procedural scientists regarding the importance of the protection function and the definition of the essence of the right to protection, the legislation of foreign countries in this area has been studied and analyzed in detail. Since our criminal procedural legislation does not have a norm defining the content of the concept of the right to defense, to prevent ambiguities in the course of the defender’s activities, one of the main purposes of writing an article is to reflect the essence of the concept of the right to defense in law. As a result of the analysis: the author’s definition of the right to protection was developed; given scientifically grounded proposals on the classification of the stages of implementation of the protection function; it was proposed to introduce the concept of the right to defense in the Criminal Procedure Code of the Republic of Uzbekistan and to present article 24 of the Code in a new edition. When writing the article, the methods of comparative legal, logical (analysis and synthesis) and complex analysis of scientific sources of knowledge were widely used.