Features of Providing Qualified Legal Assistance to Children

Children constitute a disadvantaged group and are unable to stand up for their rights and legitimate interests efficiently on their own, thus, they need professional help. In this regard, the aim of the work is to offer the concept of providing qualified legal assistance by specialized subjects whose activity is directed at safeguards for the rights of children. The main tasks of the work include: 1) identifying the features of providing qualified legal assistance to children; 2) examining the activity of specialized subjects providing legal assistance to minors for compliance to framed requirements; 3) proposing legislative amendments which entail improving the quality of legal aid in accordance with the needs of minors. During the work, there were used specific sociological, historical, comparative legal, hermeneutic, analytical methods of research. The main results of the research are as follows: 1) for the recognition of legal assistance as qualitative and qualified, it must be provided by a specially trained subject who consider the child's psychology, the nature of his/her social environment, has knowledge in the field of pedagogy and conflictology and has mediation skills; 2) todays subjects, whose activity is aimed at safeguards for the children’s rights, do not satisfy these requirements, and attempts to introduce the juvenile justice system cause concern, as system both, bureaucratic and inadequate to the needs of minors; 3) the most effectively qualified legal assistance to children can be provided by a juvenile attorney – an independent professional subject whose specialization can be implemented both, in the form of an estimation fitting criterion to professional ethics and through the introduction of an attorney’s certificate system.