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Japan’s supreme court has ordered the government to pay damages to dozens of people who were forcibly sterilised under a now-defunct eugenics law, saying the practice had violated their constitutional rights.
Wednesday’s ruling by the country’s highest court marks a major victory for the 39 plaintiffs, and thousands of other people with illnesses and genetic and mental disorders who had undergone procedures without their consent, mostly between the 1950s and 1970s.
The compensation claim rested on whether the court would accept the government’s argument that the plaintiffs could no longer seek redress as a 20-year statute of limitations applying to the cases had expired.
The 1948 eugenic protection law, which was not abolished until 1996, allowed doctors to carry out forced sterilisations to “prevent the generation of poor quality descendants”.
Japan’s government has acknowledged that 16,500 people – some as young as nine – were forcibly sterilised under the law. A further 8,500 who gave their consent were likely to have come under intense pressure to do so.
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