The Gagarinsky District Court of Moscow ordered the founders of Dissernet, Andrei Zayakin and Andrei Rostovtsev, to recognize as “defamatory and unreliable” information about plagiarism in the dissertations of capital judges Anna Starodub and Pavel Markov. This was reported by the Center for the Protection of Media Rights, whose lawyers represented the interests of Zayakin and Rostovtsev in court.
The founders of Dissernet were also ordered to pay Starodub and Markov ten thousand rubles each and restrict access to pages with information about the scientific works of judges. Lawyer of the Center for the Protection of Media Rights Ekaterina Shmykova called this decision illegal, and she intends to appeal it.
In 2020, Dissernet discovered borrowings from scientific texts published by other authors in Starodub’s candidate dissertation and Markov’s doctoral dissertation. The Ministry of Education and Science agreed with the arguments of Zayakin and Rostovtsev and deprived the judges of their scientific degrees. Later, the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow overturned these decisions.
In the summer, Markov and Starodub, as the Center for the Protection of Media Rights writes, filed almost identical claims against Zayakin and Rostovtsev for the protection of honor, dignity and business reputation.
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