Hitomi Takemura

Biography

I have worked for Kyushu International University, Fukuoka, Japan since2008. My major is public international law, especially international criminal law. I completed my doctoral and master’s studies abroad. I earned a PhD in law in June 2008 from the Irish Centre of Human Rights, National University of Ireland, Galway. I obtained a master’s degree in public international law, with a specialization in international criminal law, from Leiden University, the Netherlands. These courses were enriched by the many international students enrolled in the programs. Furthermore, my legal internship and legal clerkship experiences within various international organizations provided me with international work experiences that I would not have been able to gain had I not studied and lived abroad. I worked at the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda as a legal intern, as well as at the Legal Advisory Section of the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. Such firsthand experiences enriched the emerging arguments of my PhD thesis, and subsequently I discovered new horizons of international criminal law. In addition, international criminal law and public international law are interdisciplinary subjects by nature, especially because of their international character. Recently, I joined the Criminal Law Society of Japan in order to broaden my intellectual exchanges with my criminal law peers.