Daryo Dec 16, 2014:

"it is in the academic field. It is related to a thesis for a doctorate."
that bit of information makes quite a difference and does sound like a kind of context...

SylvieLH (asker) Dec 15, 2014:

it is in the academic field. It is related to a thesis for a doctorate.

Tony M Dec 15, 2014:

No context = no meaningful answer Surely you MUST be able to give some of the wider overall context to give us a bit of a start? Is this a 'legal' context? Academic?

It occurs to me that if there are other clues in your document suggesting that this might not be native-speaker EN, then they might be using 'supplicate' in error for the more normal 'appeal', for example.

But it all depends on what this 'candidate' is, and what the 'failure' really means...