CZECHOPEDIA

The Plzeň Law Faculty Scandals

22. 3. 2010

That university has issued law degrees to students who had only a few months of study, not to mention they could not explain how come dozens of dissertations suspiciously disappeared from its library, after media outlets got interested especially in those that were supposed to have been written by important public figures.

In 2009, a student complained to professor Petr Bezouška that he had found passages in vice-dean Ivan Tomažič's thesis that had been obviously copied from another legal text. The same student then accused the dean of the faculty, Jaroslav Zachariáš, of plagiarism as well.

According to a report from the Czech National Radio, "once that was made public, another vice-dean, Milan Kindl, declared that his colleagues' work was indeed fraudulent, but that it had been planted in the library deliberately to root out an informer who had been leaking information about the faculty to the press. Mr Kindl subsequently accused Mr Bezouška of being a snitch."

Mr Kindl, Mr Zachariáš and Mr Tomažič ended up resigning a few days later. A closer investigation promoted by the former center right government's Minister of Justice, Jiří Pospišil, found out, for example, a student who got a Master's degree in Law in 2 months, instead of the normal 5 years.

Notorious politicians with degrees from that faculty were not able to present their final dissertations (with the faculty and the now lawyers claiming they have lost the originals and have no filed copy anywhere...), like former Social Democrat premier Stanislav Gross or the mayor of Chomutov Ivana Řápková, who lost memory of her faculty days, unable to remember any teachers' names...

Vladimira Dvořáková, head of the Ministry of Education's accreditation committee, claims there exists an organized network of people who got degrees from that investigated faculty and hold positions that, knitted together by those who made possible for them to get the diplomas, can move lots of government-related interests. In the list of people who got suspicious degrees we find police officers, businessmen, politicians, people who became judges or public prosecutors.

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