Romania's Prime Minister Victor Ponta stands accused of plagiarism in the writing of his doctoral dissertation on the International Criminal Court.

More than half of his 430-page dissertation, which he defended in 2003 at Bucharest University, has been allegedly copied from other authors, according to the Nature scientific journal.

Nature says substantial sections of text seem to be identical, or almost so, to material in monographs written in Romanian by law scholars Dumitru Diaconu and Vasile Cretu. They also feature direct Romanian translations of parts of an English-language publication by law scholar Ion Diaconu, Romania – Insider.com informs.

The Romanian Prime Minister has dismissed the accusation, stating that his bitter political rival, President Traian Basescu, is behind it.

"The only reproach I have is that I did not list authors at the bottom of each page, but put them in the bibliography at the end," Ponta has also commented, as cited by international media.

Hungarian President Pal Schmitt resigned in April after losing doctorate in a plagiarism scandal. A large part of Schmitt's dissertation, written in 1992, was an exact translation of Bulgarian researcher Nikolay Georgiev's Analyse du programme olympique (des Jeux d'Olympiade).

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