Junior health minister Vicky Maeijer, who was last year accused of plagiarism in writing her master’s law degree thesis, will have to start again following the retraction of her degree in International & European Public Law by Erasmus University.

Maeijer, a minister on behalf of the far-right PVV, was said to have lifted a large number of pages of text from other sources without crediting them in her thesis when she wrote it in 2009. The discovery was made by radio station BNR which ran the theses of nine ministers through software to check for plagiarism last year. The nine were all available online.

BNR described Maeijer’s thesis as a “copy paste” job and said more than half the 69 pages were copied virtually word for word from other sources, with statements of others preceded by “I think” or “In my opinion”.  Although 24% of the pages were sourced and credited, 32% were not, even though most of them were listed in her literature list.

Maeijer, who earlier claimed she had written her thesis with the “best of intentions” and had “worked hard” to complete her degree, now says she “seems to have made big mistakes”.

The university has since said Maeijer will be given another chance to earn her degree but she will have to change the focus of her thesis, which was on a Saudi businessman whose European assets were frozen because of his possible links to al-Qaida.

“I gladly accept the opportunity to write a thesis about a whole new subject,” by “putting in hard work” and “according to the rules”, she said in a written statement.

Maeijer, who was backed by prime minister Dick Schoof when the story first broke late last year, is not planning to step down over the affair.