The General Prosecutor's Office has opened a criminal case in which in rem criminal investigations are being conducted, following a complaint claiming Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca plagiarized his doctoral thesis.
The information was confirmed by prosecutor Alexandru Ionescu, spokesperson of the General Prosecutor's Office, who mentioned the complaint was filed at the end of January, the case being built by the Department for Criminal Investigation and Forensics.
According to an article published by online publication PressOne, prosecutors have seized documents regarding the case from the Carol I National Defence University, including the doctoral thesis of the Prime Minister.
Journalist Emilia Sercan with PressOne published, on January 18, an article in which she claims that Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, a general in reserve, had plagiarized in his Ph.D. thesis titled "The dimension of the Romanian Army's deployments in multinational joint operations," defended in 2003 at the Carol I National Defence University.
Emilia Sercan stated that several pages of the Prime Minister's work were copied without the texts taken being correctly attributed to the original authors and without being placed in quotation marks, as academic norms require.
Later, the Carol I National Defence University announced it has started checks regarding the potential infringement of quality standards and university ethics' standards.
On the other hand, Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca stated that choosing the topic for the doctoral thesis depended predominantly on his personal experience accumulated in the international missions in which he participated directly, individually or with the 26th Infantry Battalion: the UN peacekeeping mission in Angola (1996-1997), the NATO mission as part of the SACEUR strategic reserve for the Western Balkans (2000-2001) and the coalition-type mission in Afghanistan (2002).
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