DThe University of Innsbruck is examining allegations of plagiarism against the Schleswig-Holstein State Secretary for Justice, Otto Carstens (CDU). The CDU politician confirmed this in a statement to a report by “Bild” on Saturday. The Luxembourg journalist Jochen Zenthöfer uncovered the plagiarism. He documented that Carstens paraphrased and uncited twelve pages of text from his dissertation from Wikipedia.
The Austrian plagiarism researcher Stefan Weber then checked the dissertation with the plagiarism software Turnitin and found at least one other serious match with the dissertation “European party democracy? Institutional prerequisites and functional conditions of the European parties to reduce the legitimacy deficit of the EU”, which Andreas von Gehlen submitted in 2005 to the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Freie Universität Berlin. This source is also not mentioned anywhere by Carstens, Weber confirmed to the FAZ
The dissertation also contains large parts of party programs that have simply been copied and reproduced using the subject (eg the Liberals). “You don’t have to call this plagiarism, just meaningless texts,” says Weber. The dissertation was submitted to the lawyer and former Innsbruck university teacher Waldemar Hummer, whose essay on the European Constitutional Convention was copied by Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. When reviewing Guttenberg’s first dissertation submitted in Bayreuth, the plagiarism in Hummer’s essay was noticed.
In a statement, Carstens pointed out that he had written his dissertation “to the best of my knowledge”. That’s why he took the first press inquiry as an opportunity to contact the University of Innsbruck and “informed them about the allegations in question”. The University of Innsbruck immediately initiated the usual procedure for allegations of plagiarism and reviewed his dissertation.