Personal details
Edwin Cameron was born in Pretoria on 15 February 1953 and completed his schooling at Pretoria Boys’ High School.
Education The award of the Anglo-American Corporation Open Scholarship enabled Cameron to attend Stellenbosch University,
where he obtained a BA Law cum laude and an Honours degree in Latin cum laude.
He lectured in Latin and Classical Studies before leaving for Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1976.
At Oxford he obtained a BA in Jurisprudence with first class honours as well as the Jurisprudence Prize,
and the BCL with first class honours and the Vinerian Scholarship. Cameron obtained his LLB from the University of South Africa cum laude and was awarded the Johannes Voet Medallion for the best law graduate.
Professional history Cameron started practice at the Johannesburg Bar in 1983, and from 1986 conducted a human rights practice from the University of the Witwatersrand’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS), where in 1989 he was awarded a personal professorship in law.
His practice included labour and employment law; defense of ANC fighters charged with treason; conscientious and religious objection; land tenure and forced removals; and gay and lesbian equality. From 1988 he advised the National Union of Mineworkers on AIDS/HIV, and helped draft and negotiate the industry’s first comprehensive AIDS agreement with the Chamber of Mines.
While at CALS, 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. He oversaw the gay and lesbian movement’s submissions to the Kempton Park negotiating process,
in the course of which he delivered his inaugural lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand, entitled "Sexual Orientation and the Constitution: A Test Case for Human Rights", which, with other work, was influential in securing the express inclusion of sexual orientation in the South African Constitution. In October 1994, after he took silk at the Bar,
President Mandela appointed him an Acting Judge of the High Court and chair of a Commission to investigate illegal arms transactions. He was appointed permanently to the High Court from 1 January 1995. In 1999/2000 he served for a year as an Acting Justice at the Constitutional Court. In 2000 he was appointed a Judge of Appeal in the Supreme Court of Appeal.
Other activities Community-related
Chair of the governing Council of the University of the Witwatersrand since 1998
Patron of the Guild Cottage Children’s Home
Patron of the Sparrow’s Nest Hospice
Patron of the Community AIDS Response (CARE)
Patron of Soweto HIV/AIDS Counsellors’ Association (SOHACA)
Co-founder of Wits Law School Endowment Appeal and first chairman (1998-2005)
Assistant General Secretary, Rhodes Trust in Southern Africa (1980-1992)
General Secretary, Rhodes Trust in Southern Africa since 2003
International
Delivered keynote address at the XII International Conference on HIV/AIDS in Durban
Invited to deliver inaugural lecture in new series of law lectures for British Academy, United Kingdom
Honours and awards
Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights
Transnet’s HIV/AIDS Champions Award
University of Stellenbosch - Alumnus Award
Special award by the Bar of England and Wales for ‘contribution to international jurisprudence and protection of human rights’
San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s Excellence in Leadership Award
‘Witness to AIDS’ jointly awarded Sunday Times/Alan Paton Prize (South Africa’s premier literary award for non-fiction)
Honorary Fellow of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies in London
Cameron has also written many scholarly articles on the judiciary, labour and employment law, the law of trusts, AIDS and HIV, the legal rights of gays and lesbians and the legal computation of time.
