Résumé:
There has been a jurisprudential debate and legislative difference on the issue of the possibility of appealing criminal judgments in the various legal systems, comparing those who reject and exclude it and those who accept and adopt it, so that the Algerian legislator is among those who say that there is no need to appeal criminal judgments based on the presence of many other guarantees that accompany criminal litigation and ensure the fairness of what is issued. There are final rulings that cannot be appealed except by cassation. However, this position, which the Algerian legislator has proven for many decades, appeared to be incorrect in the face of the errors revealed by the Supreme Court of criminal rulings, and also in the face of the increasing voices calling for the need to open the possibility of appealing the criminal ruling in order to establish fair justice, and at the same time keep pace with the contemporary criminal legislative approach, in fulfillment of Algeria’s international obligations in this regard. It is what actually happened after the first steps of approving this principle gave it a constitutional value embodied in Article 162 of the amended Algerian constitution of 2016. Immediately after that Law 07/17 was issued, it brought about a legislative revolution in the articles regulating the work of the criminal court a whole. The most prominent of which was the amendment of the Article 248 of the Algerian Criminal Procedure Code (ACPC), according to which an appellate criminal court was created to handle cases with a new ruling without addressing what was decided by the appealed ruling, an amendment that necessarily required its extension to include all the articles regulating the procedural framework for the two-level court work, whether in terms of the lineup that kept its mixed character of professional judges and jurors, or the court’s methods of communication with the cases and their procedures, from the beginning of preparation for its convening to the opening of its sessions and conducting the pleadings, to the final issuance of decisive rulings in which the law has become required that it be reasoned within what is called the reasoning paper. In addition, the legislator, under the aforementioned law 17/17 - has abandoned the default procedures and replaced them with trial procedures in absentia, and other guarantees considered as a whole as an important step towards criminal justice reform to establish a criminal justice system in which the rights and freedoms of individuals are protected.
