Paraguay’s Ministry of Education and Sciences (MEC) has stepped up oversight of higher education and begun restricting the registration of diplomas from courses that do not meet the required accreditation procedures. The move comes as a trial exposes flaws in the title-validation system in the case involving former senator Hernán Rivas.
Minister Luis Ramírez said the ministry would not register diplomas from programs that fail to meet the prescribed quality requirements. Among the new tools is the Unified Higher Education Student Registry (RUE-ES), a platform designed to track students’ academic paths from enrollment through graduation and identify inconsistencies in training and certification.
The case also involves the National Council of Higher Education (Cones), the sector’s regulatory body, and the National Agency for Evaluation and Accreditation of Higher Education (Aneaes), which is responsible for evaluating and accrediting university courses. The MEC links the measures to a diagnosis of structural shortcomings, investigations into allegedly fake diplomas and audits that could lead to administrative proceedings and complaints filed with the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
In Rivas’s trial, witnesses said the former lawmaker’s law degree was registered by the MEC on June 9, 2020, in about six minutes, even though the study certificate did not meet the requirements of Resolution No. 2,424/2016. Employee Andrea Estigarribia said Ricardo Ortiz, then director general, had allegedly conveyed a “higher-up order” verbally to complete the procedure.
Estigarribia said she understood that the instruction came from then-minister Eduardo Petta. Petta testified by videoconference because he is abroad, denied giving the order and said he did not maintain direct contact with lower-ranking employees. He also said he did not know Rivas and had never spoken with him.
The former minister added that an opinion by Casañas Levi had recommended reviewing the degree-awarding process but, according to his testimony, did not conclude that the diploma was fake. The prosecution intends to confront the testimonies to support the existence of an institutional chain of irregularities. Rivas faces allegations of producing and using unauthentic documents; the case is still under trial.