Edwin Cameron
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The Honourable Edwin Cameron |
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| Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa | |
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Assumed office 1 January 2009 |
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| Appointed by | President Kgalema Motlanthe |
| Judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal | |
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In office July 2000 – 31 December 2008 |
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| Appointed by | President Thabo Mbeki |
| Acting Judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa | |
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In office August 1999 – May 2000 |
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| Judge of the Witwatersrand Local Division | |
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In office 1 January 1995 – July 2000 |
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| Appointed by | President Nelson Mandela |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
15 February 1953 Pretoria, South Africa |
| Alma mater |
Stellenbosch University Keble College, Oxford University of South Africa |
Edwin Cameron (born 15 February 1953 in Pretoria) is 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".
Cameron was born in Pretoria. His father was imprisoned for car theft and his mother did not have the means to support him. He therefore spent much of his childhood in an orphanage in Queenstown. His elder sister was killed when Cameron was nine.
Cameron won a scholarship to attend Pretoria Boys’ High School, one of South Africa's best state schools, and reinvented himself, he says, "in the guise of a clever schoolboy". Thereafter he went to Stellenbosch University, studying Latin and classics. Here he stayed at Wilgenhof Mens Residence.After this he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. There he switched to law and earned a BA in Jurisprudence and the Bachelor of Civil Law, winning the Vinerian Scholarship. When he returned to South Africa he completed an LLB at the University of South Africa and was its best law graduate.
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.
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