The case of alleged plagiarism committed, as part of his law thesis defended, in December 2015, at the University of Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne, by the lawyer and elected official (Les Républicains) of Courbevoie (Hauts- de-Seine) Arash Derambarsh, is experiencing a new twist. In a decision of March 14, the National Council for Higher Education and Research (Cneser) ruling in disciplinary matters canceled the decision taken, in July 2020, by the disciplinary section of the Paris-I academic council.
At first instance, the disciplinary section had definitively excluded the lawyer “of any public institution of higher education”. She had canceled the thesis defense test and withdrawn the doctoral degree from Mr. Derambarsh, a gateway which had given him access to the bar school.
Violation of the secrecy of the instruction
While Mr. Derambarsh had appealed, the Cneser considered that the university’s disciplinary decision was “tainted with illegality”. However, the National Council concluded that the lawyer “performed on more than one hundred pages of his thesis (…) copy-paste from his numerous sources without citing them in the text or in footnotes” and highlighted “attributable wrongful conduct” to Mr. Derambarsh. The latter is thus excluded from “any institution of higher education” for five years, and the defense test is cancelled.
In its nine-page decision, the Cneser makes several complaints to the disciplinary jurisdiction of the University of Paris-I. He accuses him of having violated the secrecy of the investigation, the first instance decision having been “illegally sent to third parties, who revealed its content”.
The Cneser accuses the disciplinary section of having considered “in his decision”based on “materially inaccurate facts”, “that Mr. Derambarsh had delivered to the investigating magistrates and to the court falsified versions of his thesis, to hide the plagiarism”. He observes that the court has ” taken back “ in the ” contents “ of the decision “the distortion of the nature of the remarks made during the investigation” by Professor Bruno Dondero, thesis director of Mr. Derambarsh.
The distortion of Mr. Dondero’s remarks prompted Mr. Derambarsh to file a complaint with civil action, in 2021, for “forgery and use of forgery in aggravated public writing” against the university and the eight members of the disciplinary section . Finally, the Cneser criticizes the faculty for not having “provided no explanation” about the disappearance “of the defense report, which was not found in the file among the hundreds of theses lost by the University of Paris-I”.
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