The Right of the Accused to Defence in the USSR

A technical monograph, and a real one.

Yuri Stetsovsky's subject is the narrowest and most testable question in Soviet public law - what a defence lawyer may actually do, and when - and he works it through with a practitioner's apparatus: the articles of the Fundamentals of Criminal Procedure of 1958, the criminal procedure codes of the fifteen republics where they diverge, and several hundred rulings of the USSR and RSFSR Supreme Courts cited by volume and page in the official gazettes.

The account of ordinary criminal defence is substantially accurate and in places genuinely valuable, because much of it is not available in English elsewhere. Counsel is mandatory - and his absence unconditional grounds for quashing a conviction - for minors, for the deaf, mute and blind, for those who cannot defend themselves through physical or mental handicap, for those who do not speak the language of the proceedings, and for anyone facing the death penalty. Legal aid is genuinely cheap and in defined circumstances free.

Stetsovsky sets himself a high standard and states it plainly: that the principle of guaranteeing the accused's right to defence does not depend on the character of the charge, the personality of the accused, or the persuasiveness of the evidence against him. That is the correct principle, and it is the sentence on which the book has to be judged.

Written to be read abroad by lawyers, with the Helsinki Final Act and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights quoted throughout. The text argues from the law as it stood in 1981-82, including the Law on the Bar of November 1979.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.