Interior Minister Lucian Bode has lost a second lawsuit against the University of Babes Bolyai (UBB) in Cluj-Napoca, which found that he had plagiarized his doctoral thesis. In this file, he asked to suspend the January decision by which the UBB recognized his thesis as plagiarized, according to journalist Emilia Sherkan, the one who started the accusations of doctoral studies.

The case was heard in the Bucharest court after Lucian Bode changed his place of residence in the documents from Zalău to Bucharest, writes Emilia Sercan.

How Bode is still trying to block the procedure for checking his PhD thesis

• On May 10, the Bucharest Court will rule on the second lawsuit from this file, related to the annulment of the decision by which the UBB found that the doctoral dissertation of Minister Lucian Bode was plagiarized.
• On May 12, the Bucharest Court of Appeal will rule on the request to suspend the self-referral to the National Ethics Board of the Ministry of Research. In the previous terms, the National Ethics Council was not legally represented in this case, as the Ministry of Research did not sign the legal representative of the institution with a power of attorney for representation in court, says journalist Emilia Tserkan.
• May 19 is the deadline for the Selage court in another case, in which Lucian Bode requests that UBB’s self-referral decision be overturned in order to test his thesis and bring in outside experts (Professor Biola from Oxford and Prof. Fumurescu from Houston). In the first, lost in January, Bode only asked for a suspension.

Babesh-Bolyai Ethics Commission: “The thesis is deeply wrong”

In January, the Babesh-Bolyai University Ethics Commission analyzed the doctoral thesis of Interior Minister Lucian Bode and concluded that “the vast majority of suspicions of plagiarism are confirmed” and that “the revealed ethical violations” are important enough to conclude that the thesis is deeply flawed.

• Lucian Bode is not resigning after the plagiarism ruling: I will go forward, to court, because it is the only right way. I regret that UBB succumbed to pressure
• The party instructs liberals to attack journalist Emilia Serkan. A PNL evaluation with “key messages” for Lucian Bode’s Ph.D

The ethics committee asked Bode to correct the thesis and withdraw the book published on its basis. It also reports to the CNATDCU/National Research Ethics Board “for additional steps as required by law.”

• “The UBB Ethics Commission adopted on 01.09.2023 Decision No. 1 of 2023 as a result of an independent report after receiving new information regarding suspected plagiarism in the doctoral dissertation of Mr. Lucian Bode.
• The conclusion of the analysis is that suspicions of plagiarism are mostly confirmed.
• In the absence of a legal possibility to apply disciplinary action against a person who is not a member of the scientific community, the Commission requests corrections to the thesis and the withdrawal of the book published on the basis of the thesis, and the national boards (CNATDCU/National Research Ethics Board) will be notified of further steps , in accordance with the law,” says the message of the UBB Ethics Commission.

• READ HERE THE FULL DECISION OF THE ETHICS COMMISSION OF BABESH BOLYAI UNIVERSITY

“Burning pressure on the hearth”

In the first lawsuit against UBB, the Minister of Internal Affairs demanded the suspension of the decision of the UBB Ethics Commission, which re-examined his doctoral dissertation. On January 17, Salaj’s court rejected his request as “unfounded,” and Lucian Bode appealed the decision.

Lucian Bode reacted to this with a message published on Facebook entitled “The fight for the truth continues”, in which he argued that today’s decision of the Salaj court “is natural in the context in which the UBB ethics commission has taken a preliminary decision before the court for sentencing”. :

• “The ethics committee has no legal authority to re-evaluate a doctoral thesis whose author is not a member of the university community, and I do not belong to that community.
• The examination procedure was carried out with violations. The entity that submitted the report itself cannot be the one that decides the self-referral on the merits, being clearly impartial. In addition, there is no analysis report in the sense of the law.
• Alleged deviations from the citation standards contained in Decision no. 1/2023 are illegal and baseless. A special review by the Ethics Committee referred to recently updated citation standards that were not in effect at the time of the thesis defense, aspects confirmed by the view communicated by the Doctoral School.
• “Steps will be continued because, despite all the pressure to ‘burn at the stake’, it is just as NATURAL that the truth prevails and the law is respected in every case,” Bode concluded his message.

The Commission reported on itself after PressOne, under the signature of journalist Emilia Sherkan, published an analysis according to which the doctoral dissertation of Interior Minister Lucian Bode contains at least 18.5% plagiarized text, as well as 6 completely plagiarized illustrations and another 30 incorrectly cited. . Initially, the Ethics Commission did not examine the entire doctoral thesis of the Minister of the Interior, Lucian Bode, but only the fragments that were found to be plagiarized, finding that the fragments identified as containing a problem of plagiarism represented approximately 1,923 words out of 65,000 words. theses (2.95%).