Prosecutor’s Office opens criminal file following complaint on plagiarism of PM’s PhD thesis

The General Prosecutor’s Office has opened a criminal case in rem, following a complaint alleging that Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă plagiarized his PhD thesis. The information was confirmed by the prosecutor Alexandru Ionescu, the spokesman of the General Prosecutor’s Office, who specified that the complaint was filed at the end of January, the file being set up at the Criminal Investigation and Forensic Section.

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 from PressOne published an article in January saying that Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, a general in reserve, had plagiarized in his Ph.D. thesis entitled “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).