Journalist Emilia Șercan reveals when she started checking Radu Marinescu's doctorate / How she responds to PSD attacks
The journalist Emilia Șercan spoke, in a dialogue with HotNews, about the attacks launched against him after he wrote in PressOne that the doctoral thesis of the Minister of Justice, Radu Marinescu, was plagiarized: “The attack on the person does not mean that Mr. Marinescu's doctoral thesis is not plagiarized”.
In the first public reaction after the revelations in PressOne, PSD harshly attacked the journalist Emilia Șercan and accused a “vile maneuver”: “A person cannot substitute himself for the legal institutions of the state and cannot give verdicts that clearly contradict the official decisions of these courts, even less when the person in question is himself an impostor and plagiarized his own bachelor's thesis.”
Contacted by HotNews, Emilia Șercan said that “I don't know if I, as a journalist, have to respond to an attack coming from a political party, but, nevertheless, I will try to explain”:
“Both in the statements made by the minister, during today, and in the PSD press release, there are a series of personal attacks. And in the minister's reaction there are several lies and manipulations. The personal attack does not mean that Mr. Marinescu's doctoral thesis is not plagiarized. We are simply talking about very clear evidence. The word plagiarism means the way in which a text is taken from another text, so I, as a journalist, can say that a work is plagiarized. I don't have to I am an institution. I can do this analysis, find the similarities between a doctoral thesis and a paper and explain it publicly.”
The Ethics Commission of the University of Craiova decides today whether to report itself in the case of accusations of plagiarism against Minister Radu Marinescu
When Emilia Șercan says that she started checking the doctoral thesis of the Minister of Justice
Emilia Șercan says that the plagiarism verdict on minister Radu Marinescu's doctoral thesis came after an “absolutely rigorous, lasting analysis”:
“I saw the fact that they are wondering why this attack came now, three days after he announced the procedure for appointing the chief prosecutors. I didn't start on Thursday afternoon to verify Mr. Marinescu's doctoral thesis, after the procedure for appointing the chief prosecutors was publicly announced. It was a verification process that took months, started even before the Recorder Justiție Capturăta documentary.”
Asked when the thesis verification actually started, she said “around the beginning of November”.
“That's when I started the steps, basically, to check. Obviously you can't do this thing overnight. I went, as far as my time allowed, both to the National Library, where there is data that I was during this period, I also went to the Law Library of the University of Bucharest to look for specialized books, I ordered one of the sources, which I found by ordering from an online antiquarian. I mean, a check doesn't mean you're done, you went to the library, you found all the sources and wrote the text”, explained Emilia Șercan.
PSD claims in the press release sent on Monday that “Radu Marinescu is not at all in the situation of other dignitaries targeted by similar accusations. His doctoral work has already been validated by the Doctoral Commission and CNATDCU”.
Asked what she thinks the PSD is referring to when it says this about Radu Marinescu's doctoral thesis, Emilia Șercan replied: “I can't figure out what it is referring to. All doctorates in Romania are validated by a verification committee, and later by the CNATDCU. There was no special, distinct and unique procedure for Mr. Marinescu, but the exact same procedure was followed to validate the thesis by a committee of referents and then by the CNATDCU”, she Şercan explained.
How Radu Marinescu tried to defend himself: “This was the first line of defense”
The investigative journalist says that the “first line of defense” of the Minister of Justice, since Sunday, when he was contacted by PressOne for a point of view, was to say that the thesis was made under the guidance of a coordinator and that it was validated by the commission and later by the CNATDCU:
“He is trying to throw the responsibility practically behind this committee and the coordinator. The responsibility is an individual one, first of all the doctoral student, and let's not forget that there is a declaration of originality that the doctoral student signs. This declaration even attracts criminal liability, in the case of Mr. Marinescu it can no longer be applied because the statute of limitations has intervened, we are talking about 5 years from the time of the defense of the doctoral thesis”.
Emilia Șercan says that for her it is “downright scandalous” the way the PSD reacts to these revelations, considering that “it is the party that practically committed, I think, the biggest academic atrocities, starting in 2012, when former prime minister Victor Ponta plagiarized, abolished a commission of the ministry to prevent the verification of that doctorate, supported Sorin Cîmpeanu as Minister of Education (n. ed.: in 2014), which even initiated a later repealed Government decision so that those who wanted to give up their doctorate could do so”.
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“Personal attacks do not bring arguments and do not solve the core of the problem”
Journalist Emilia Șercan claims that the PSD has the least legitimacy to position itself publicly considering “the dozens of cases of plagiarism it has, some of them revealed by me myself, in the past, even many ministers about whom I wrote that they had plagiarized”.
“PSD should have public positions in the sense of solving this problem or turning integrity in politics and in the public space into a value, and not in a dispute with a journalist”, believes Șercan.
Asked how he responds to PSD's accusations, which claims that the journalist is an “impostor and plagiarized her own bachelor thesis”, Șercan replied:
“I have answered this matter dozens of times, I do not want to repeat this. It is the easiest personal attack, in which you go public with a disclosure of this kind, and personal attacks do not bring arguments and do not solve the substance of the problem, even more so ad-hominem attacks, are not a practical form of argument in such a discussion, do not solve the issue of Radu Marinescu's plagiarism, this does not mean that the evidence of plagiarism in his thesis Radu Marinescu disappears”.
