Resumen de Sobre la limitada vigencia del derecho de defensa

Luis Rodríguez

• The “right of defense”, seen as the right to defend oneself who has been charged in a criminal process, is a set of rights. Most of them have been recognized by the Spanish Constitution and the ratified Conventions of Human Rights.

  This article critizes faults existing in the Spanish criminal procedure, in spite of the satisfactory declaration of those rights from a Constitutional point of view. On the one hand there are structural faults such as the persistence of the examinig magistrate, an anachronistic and unconstitutional figure. On the other hand, the unsatisfactory constitutional and legal regulation of the detention, communication interventions and reporting restrictions, as well as the debate about the quality of lawyers, still remain.

  The article concludes by analising the unjustified expansion of the Criminal Law and the importance of the right of the defence nowadays