Hoko Horii has been a PhD candidate at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and the Van Vollenhoven Institute since March 2016.

More information about Hoko Horii

Hoko Horii has been a PhD candidate at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and the Van Vollenhoven Institute since March 2016. Hoko’s research tries to understand the reasons behind the persisting gap between international human rights standards and social practice regarding child marriage in Indonesia, focusing on the co-existence of conflicting norms within the Indonesian legal system. This research project is partly funded by the Toyota Foundation (2016-2018).

Hoko received her bachelor degree in Law (2013) at Keio University, and her master degree in Comparative Law (2015) at Nagoya University, both in Japan. For her master thesis, she conducted interviews with judges and collected data in religious courts in West Java. These data show that judges often refer to zinah in their reasoning for granting official marriage status to underage marriages, by citing Islamic law. By doing so, judges try to protect girls from the psychological and social sufferings caused by out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Next to her studies, she worked on several development projects in Jakarta (Indonesia), Cebu (the Philippines) and Yangon (Myanmar). Before starting her PhD, she also worked as a research assistant in the Center for Asian Legal Exchange (Nagoya, Japan).

Publications