Reading through threads on this site, whilst one cannot and must not tar all supervisors of PhD candidates with the same brush, some of the of PhD candidates’ frequent complaints/allegations on this site include, but not limited to the following.

1) Appointing supervisors who are not specialists in the PhD candidates’ fields of study.
2) Appointing university lecturers without a PhD to supervise PhD candidates.
3) Lack of adequate supervision (e.g. not providing critical feedbacks to supervisee as at and when due, not meeting regularly with supervisees to review progress, etc).
4) PhD supervisors passing on their supervisees’ work as their own in publications without any reference to the actual author.
5) Appointing examiners (internals and externals) who are not known to be specialists in the PhD candidates’ fields of study.

Personally, I experienced/suffered (1-2 and 5 listed above). You can read my story here (http://www.postgraduateforum.com/threadViewer.aspx?TID=10217#repliesTop).

My question is this. Are these issues and many more horror stories frequently told on this forum peculiar to the UK PhD system or is it the same experience across the rest of Western Europe and North America?