Almanac of law. Issue 17 (2026), pages 81–87.

DOI: 10.33663/2524-017X-2026-17-81-87

Kvasha O. О.
The role of the court in protecting and restoring human rights in the perspective of introducing transitional justice in Ukraine

Restoration of justice, violated rights of victims depend primarily on the implementation by the courts of Ukraine of criminal liability and punishment of persons who committed war and international crimes.

In Ukraine, the inclusion of international institutions in the process of considering this category of crimes, the creation of an international tribunal for the crime of aggression is being discussed. However, the main burden of implementing criminal liability and punishment of persons who committed international crimes lies with national courts. In conditions of social conflicts and armed aggression, the transitional justice model is applied. In the perspective of achieving sustainable peace in Ukraine, transitional justice is a complex system of primarily judicial national mechanisms along with international, as well as extrajudicial ones. This system is aimed at protecting and restoring human rights violated in the context of Russia’s military aggression, which includes such interrelated elements as holding the guilty accountable, compensating the victims for the harm caused, establishing the truth, and implementing institutional reforms to prevent similar incidents in the future. Effective protection of human rights and freedoms, as well as the restoration of violated rights, are possible only under the conditions of effective judicial proceedings, holding accountable and punishing all those guilty of committing crimes. At the current stage of the ongoing Russian aggression and at the same time judicial reform, the attention of scientists and practitioners is focused on the problem of the functioning of the judiciary, the conditions and procedure for solving social tasks of protecting human rights and freedoms by the courts. Therefore, the issue of protecting human and civil rights and freedoms by the courts of Ukraine is becoming more relevant. The Constitution of Ukraine and current legislation provide courts with the power to protect the rights and legitimate interests of citizens and legal entities, the interests of the state, and restore violated rights. The absence of a unified vision of the phenomenon of transitional justice (transitive justice) in world practice is due to objective conditions. International experience in this area is obviously insufficient to form a single concept of transitional justice. Transitional justice is applied in societies that have undergone transformation from authoritarian to democratic regimes or have experienced war. That is, one should take into account the extremeness and specificity of real circumstances that determine the need to form a transitional justice strategy. The implementation of a certain model in each country has a certain percentage of uniqueness, which depends on the historical and political foundations of the development of society, as well as ethnic and religious factors. It is the independence of the court that guarantees the realization of the right to a fair trial, and public trust in the court is an important factual/social component of the legitimacy of the judiciary along with the formal/normative component. Human rights in Ukraine are guaranteed primarily by the right to judicial protection, therefore the independence of the court is an imperative guarantee of the implementation of the right to a fair trial.

Keywords: protection of human rights, transitional justice, transitional justice, the right to a fair trial, access to justice, the right to a fair trial, war crime, criminal justice, armed aggression, independence of the court.

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Дата першого надходження рукопису до видання: 11.03.2026
Дата прийнятого до друку рукопису після рецензування: 09.04.2026
Дата публікації: 30.04.2026