Edwin Cameron

Cameron retired on 20 August 2019, the 25th anniversary of his appointment to the bench.

In July 2019, at a UNAIDS Press Conference, Cameron linked activism against criminalization, discrimination and stigma, to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 16 where he stated "Almost all countries have some form of criminal prohibition on sex work. [...] criminalization has severe consequences taking people outside of areas of protection. It declares [the criminalized group's] actions or identity illegitimate, and increases stigma. It excludes them from protections that our judicial, social and economic systems may provide. UNAIDS data indicates that criminalized groups often experience high rates of violence. If you suffer criminal violence and you yourself are criminalized, in most cases you simply cannot go to the police."

Cameron was, until 2015, the general secretary of the Rhodes Scholarships in Southern Africa and is a patron of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal. Between 1998 and 2008, Cameron chaired the Council of the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the patron of the Guild Cottage Children's Home, the Soweto HIV/AIDS Counselors' Association and Community AIDS Response. In January 2020 he became the Chancellor of Stellenbosch University.

On 31 December 2008 President Kgalema Motlanthe appointed Cameron to the Constitutional Court, taking effect from 1 January 2009. He is considered a crucial member of the Court's progressive wing. He has been described as a "jurist of the highest order", "the greatest legal mind of his generation" and "in a league of his own".

Cameron has been a staunch supporter of the full decriminalization of sex work. His advocacy and activism has sought to link criminalization, discrimination and stigma, and more recently how these link to Sustainable Development Goal 16. In 2008, at the 17th International AIDS Conference held in Mexico, Cameron called for a sustained and vocal campaign against HIV criminalization. At the 21st International Aids Conference, held in 2016 in Durban, South Africa, Cameron expanded on the call for decriminalization of HIV, stating "[t]he biggest problem is stigma. Stigma, stigma, stigma, stigma. Stigma remains a barrier to prevention, it remains a barrier to behavior change, it remains a barrier to people accessing treatment." During the same speech, Cameron invited any sex workers present to join him on stage and indicated that sex work is "one of the most dangerous and despised occupations, and one that deserves our support and our respect and our love." He further stated "Sex workers are perhaps the most reviled group in human history - indispensable to a portion of mostly heterosexual males in society, but despised, marginalized, persecuted, beaten up and imprisoned. Sex workers work. Their work is work with dignity."

In 2002 the Bar of England and Wales honoured him with a Special Award for his contribution to international jurisprudence and human rights. He is an honorary fellow of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, and Keble College, Oxford; and was a visiting fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 2003–04, researching "Aspects of the AIDS Epidemic, examining in particular the denialist stance supported by SA President Mbeki". In 2009 Cameron was appointed as an Honorary Master of the Bench of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. He has five honorary doctorates.

Cameron's awards include the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights (2000); Stellenbosch University's Alumnus Award; Transnet's HIV/AIDS Champions Award; and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation Excellence in Leadership Award. In 2008 he served as a member of the Jury of the Red Ribbon Award, a partnership of the UNAIDS Family. He is the 2009–2010 winner of the Brudner Prize from Yale University, awarded annually to an accomplished scholar or activist whose work has made significant contributions to the understanding of LGBT issues or furthered the tolerance of LGBT people. In 2019, Cameron was awarded the Asijiki Awward for Service and Humanity from the Asijiki Coalition, which advocates for the decriminalization of sex work in South Africa.

In 1999, Cameron was given an acting stint on the Constitutional Court, during which he partook in its seminal judgments in Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Grootboom and wrote the Liquor Bill judgment on provincial legislative powers — the first, and still the only, case to be referred to the Court by the President of South Africa under section 79 of the Constitution. The Judicial Service Commission had recommended that Cameron be permanently appointed, but Sandile Ngcobo was ultimately preferred due to the late intercession of Thabo Mbeki, then Deputy President, who felt the appointee should be black. Cameron has said there is "no doubt" this was the correct decision.

Cameron was appointed permanently to the Witwatersrand Local Division in 1995. His best-known judgment in this capacity is Holomisa v Argus Newspapers Ltd, where Bantu Holomisa had brought a defamation suit against The Star for alleging that he had been "directly involved" in the infiltration into South Africa of an Azanian People's Liberation Army "hit squad" aimed at "killing whites". Cameron's judgment was described as a "most rigorous exposition" of the Constitution's application to private disputes and a "landmark" defence of free speech. Others, while acknowledging the judgment had departed importantly from apartheid-era law, said it should have gone further in protecting journalists. Cameron's position was substantially confirmed, in subsequent cases, by the Supreme Court of Appeal.

1995 saw the publication of Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, "a celebration of the lives of gay men and lesbians in South Africa" which Cameron co-edited with Mark Gevisser.

In October 1994, President Nelson Mandela appointed Cameron as an acting judge of the High Court to chair a commission of inquiry into illegal arms sales by Armscor, operating as the sales arm of the SANDF, to Yemen. Cameron's report was described as a "hard-hitting" critique of Armscor's conduct, but was quickly eclipsed by myriad other allegations about the South African government's illegal arms trades.

Cameron has been openly gay since the early 1980s. He addressed the crowd in the first pride parade in South Africa held in Johannesburg on 13 October 1990. Thereafter he oversaw the gay and lesbian movement's submissions to the drafters of the South African Constitution and was instrumental in securing the inclusion of an express prohibition on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. He is one of 29 signatories to the Yogyakarta Principles. He also was a founding member of the Society for Homosexuals on Campus, a student organization at the University of the Witwatersrand, which later became known as Activate Wits.

From 1988 Cameron advised the National Union of Mineworkers on HIV/AIDS, and helped draft and negotiate the industry's first comprehensive AIDS agreement with the Chamber of Mines. While at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, he drafted the Charter of Rights on AIDS and HIV, co-founded the AIDS Consortium (a national affiliation of non-governmental organizations working in AIDS), which he chaired for its first three years, and founded and was the first director of the AIDS Law Project.

Cameron's early career combined academia and legal practice. In 1982, while working as a senior lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, he famously wrote a scathing critique of the late Chief Justice L. C. Steyn, then a darling of the apartheid establishment. And, in 1987, Cameron argued that three senior South African judges, including its former Chief Justice, Pierre Rabie, ought to resign to preserve the legitimacy of the judiciary. Cameron practised at the Johannesburg Bar from 1983 to 1994. From 1986 he was a human rights lawyer at Wits's Centre for Applied Legal Studies, where in 1989 he was awarded a personal professorship in law. Cameron's practice included labour and employment law; defence of African National Congress fighters charged with treason; conscientious and religious objection; land tenure and forced removals; and gay and lesbian equality. In 1992 he became a co-author (with Tony Honoré, one of his mentors at Oxford) of Honoré's South African Law of Trusts. Cameron took silk in 1994.

Cameron had himself contracted HIV in the 1980s and became extremely ill with AIDS when working as a High Court judge. His salary allowed him to afford anti-retroviral treatment, which saved his life. Cameron's realisation that he owed his life to his relative wealth caused him to become a prominent HIV/AIDS activist in post-apartheid South Africa, urging its government to provide treatment to all. He has strongly criticised President Thabo Mbeki's AIDS-denialist policies. Cameron was the first, and remains the only, senior South African official to state publicly that he is living with HIV/AIDS.

Edwin Cameron (born 15 February 1953 in Pretoria) was a judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He is well known for his HIV/AIDS and gay-rights activism and was hailed by Nelson Mandela as "one of South Africa's new heroes".