Public prosecutor's office does not act on Mörgeli complaint
The Zurich Public Prosecutor’s Office has declined to pursue a criminal complaint filed by Christoph Mörgeli against three «Rundschau» employees. The SVP National Council member and titular professor filed the complaint too late. The Public Prosecutor’s Office therefore issued a so-called “decision not to proceed.”.
In spring 2013, "Rundschau" reported critically on the way in which dissertations were supervised and accepted at the University of Zurich's Institute of Medical History. Christoph Mörgeli was mainly affected by this criticism. In May 2014, Mörgeli then filed a complaint against editorial director Mario Poletti, presenter Sandro Brotz and editor Marc Meschenmoser. He accused them of defamation, slander and libel (Werbewoche.ch reported). The non-prosecution order states that the deadline for such a criminal complaint is three months. The spokeswoman for the Zurich Attorney General confirmed to the news agency SDA a corresponding report by Tagesanzeiger.ch/Newsnet on Tuesday. This is not the first time that Mörgeli has missed a deadline. In June, the Federal Supreme Court rejected an appeal (Werbewoche.ch reported), with which he had appealed a decision by the Independent Complaints Authority for Radio and Television (UBI). At the time, it was also about the television program on the dissertations. However, Mörgeli had not submitted the contested document in time.
Lack of quality and support
After the "Rundschau" newspaper raised doubts about the quality of the doctoral theses supervised by Mörgeli, the University of Zurich had a representative number of medical history dissertations examined by international experts. They came to the conclusion that Mörgeli, together with his former boss Beat Rüttimann, had often approved poor-quality dissertations. The experts attributed the poor quality to inadequate supervision of the doctoral students. (SDA)
