Do I have the legal right to demand information on plagiarism of my work from another university? A student of a German institute has translated my Russian thesis word by word to English and submitted it as her own work in 2014. I informed the university providing them with my work in Russian and presentations of the work I made in 2013. 
Upon receiving my email, university examinations first asked for a legal translation of my work. To which I replied that my work was written in Russian and that is a reason why it was stolen – for translation – and also that the legal translation of even one page would cost a lot. And since I was the victim in this case, I suggested that their university is responsible for preventing the acceptance of plagiarised works and has to either translate my work or ask one a professor who speaks Russian to confirm the match. Also, I suggested them to look at numerous tables with hundreds of numbers and match them (providing pages). 

Two months have passed since then, and I still haven’t received any update. I called the examination office, and the woman re-directed me to her colleague, who then told me that:


Me not being a student of that university, I have no right for any information.
If there was any plagiarism, their system would recognise it. 
I should ask the student who I claim has stolen my work on any information.


Yet the problem is:


Their European plagiarism system has no access to the database of university in Russia, and moreover my thesis is in Russian, while she submitted translated English version. So plagiarism is untraceable by their system. Which they apparently ignore.
Asking me to talk to the person committing the plagiarism, who in the first place lied to me when stealing my work, and declined my request for her to come forward and recall work. It is the same as police would tell the assault victim to go and talk to the criminal.


Is there any legal way for me to get the answer on the plagiarism case from this university? Shouldn’t the university be checking the translation of my thesis rather than requesting me to make an official translation? After all it’s their job to prevent plagiarism! And given their system has holes – I did part of the job for them already – identifying that the work is plagiarism and its up for them to check.

Yet they completely brush me off saying I am not involved and have no rights.
In my opinion, what seems to have gone wrong is that the examination office employees do not have an interest in pursuing this issue. After all, the student having handed in your thesis may sue the university if the thesis gets rejected. After the degree has already been awarded to the student, it is quite difficult to retract the degree. This is probably why they asked for an official translation. By the way, the examination office does not rate or examine anything - they are concerned with the administrative processes of examinations, and are thus probably unable to deal with this issue correctly. They might have felt that they need to deal with this issue, though, which is why they asked you to provide an official translation. As you wrote, you shouldn't be expected to pay for this.

As a suggestion, you may want to consider contacting researchers at the university directly. Point of contact number one should probably be the advisor of plagiarizing student. Other points of contact may be the secondary examiner, or the dean of studies. Provide them with bibliographical information about your thesis and a PDF of your thesis. At larger universities, there may probably be Russian PhD students that they can ask for a first look. In the east of Germany, it is not entirely uncommon that older professors can read Russian themselves. Once they have some indication that your accusation may be correct, they are likely to arrange for a closer check.