IN A landmark decision, Japan’s Supreme Court ordered the government on Wednesday to pay compensation to about a dozen victims who were forcibly sterilised under a now-defunct Eugenics Protection Law.

The law was designed to eliminate offspring of people with disabilities.

An estimated 25,000 people were sterilised between the 1950s and 1970s without consent to “prevent the birth of poor-quality descendants” under the law, described by plaintiffs’ lawyers as “the biggest human rights violation in the post-war era” in Japan.