Twenty-two nursing diplomas with no enrolment, no exams and no money trail: the University of Kragujevac annulments

Serbia's public universities are legitimate, EU-oriented institutions, and Kragujevac's Faculty of Medical Sciences is a real medical faculty. That is what makes the case reported by the North Macedonian outlet Sloboden Pečat significant: the diplomas were genuine documents from a genuine faculty, issued to people who had not studied there.

According to the report, Serbia's prosecutor's office and police investigated the illegal issuance of 22 diplomas by the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the University of Kragujevac to nurses from Croatia, and a further 15 diplomas from various faculties — mainly management and economics — issued to citizens of Kosovo and North Macedonia. At the university there was no evidence that the 22 had ever enrolled: no record of exams passed, no recognition of prior qualifications, and no trace of any money paid for their education. The rector annulled the 22 diplomas, all issued in 2014. Those investigated are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

The Balkan context, as a regional integrity report cited by B-IRC describes, is a long-running market in forged and improperly issued credentials moving across the borders of Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Albania — the same market that produced the Goražde case in Bosnia published on this site. Healthcare credentials are especially valuable in it because they travel: a nursing or medical diploma from a Serbian public university opens doors in Croatia and, through Croatia, the European Union.

The mechanism is internal — a faculty's own administration issuing documents outside its own records — which is why the usual student-side checks (is the university real? is it accredited?) do not catch it. What catches it is the thing that caught it here: verification against the university's records by someone other than the person holding the diploma. Regulators in the EU and beyond now do this routinely for foreign healthcare qualifications, and diplomas that were bought rather than earned surface years later, when the holder has a job, a licence and a family depending on both.

For students the point is simple, and it applies to every "arranged" credential from any respected institution: a real diploma without a real transcript behind it is a forgery with better paper. Anyone offering a qualification that skips enrolment, examinations and the years between them is offering to end your career at a date of someone else's choosing.