Ethics Commission: Interior Minister Lucian Bode’s PhD thesis includes “quotation errors” and “some plagiarized fragments”

Interior Minister Lucian Bode’s doctoral thesis includes “citation errors” and “some plagiarized fragments”, the Ethics Commission of the “Babeş-Bolyai” University (UBB) in Cluj-Napoca found. According to the commission, “it does not result with certainty that the plagiarism was intentional or rather it resulted from ignorance or non-application of citation techniques”, but this does not change the conclusion that there are plagiarized fragments.

Interior Minister Lucian Bode defended his doctoral thesis with the title “Energy security and resource management at the beginning of the 21st century. Romania in the current European context” in 2018, at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (UBB), under the guidance of the coordinator prof. Dr. Adrian Liviu Ivan.

The UBB ethics commission states that it analyzed the notification regarding the doctoral thesis of the Minister of the Interior exclusively from the perspective of deviations from ethics in research, not analyzing the work from the point of view of its quality, an attribute that belongs to the doctoral thesis support commission and CNATDCU. The UBB Ethics Commission states that it found a series of deviations from good publication norms – citation errors and some plagiarized fragments.

The commission therefore notes the existence of deviations from research ethics. Regarding possible sanctions, the Commission would have proposed sanctioning Minister Bode with a written warning and the correction of all works published in violation of the rules of good conduct.

“However, we find that the reported person of is not part of the categories provided by law against which a sanction can be applied regarding the violation of university ethics and good conduct in research”, the UBB Ethics Commission also states.