Edwin Cameron

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Edwin Cameron (2006)

Edwin Cameron (born February 15, 1953 in Pretoria ) is a South African lawyer, judge at the Constitutional Court of the Republic of South Africa and AIDS activist.

education

Cameron comes from a poor white family. After graduating from high school, a scholarship gave him the opportunity to study law and Latin at the University of Stellenbosch . He graduated with a Bachelor cum laude in Law and a Bachelor with Honors in Latin. He taught Latin and Classical Philology for some time before going to Keble College , Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship . He earned a Bachelor of Law and a Bachelor of Civil Law, for which he won the Vinerian Scholarship as the best student in his year . Back in his home country, he attended the University of South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Laws cum laude, the best graduate he received the Johannes Voet Medallion .

Career

He practiced as a barrister at the Johannesburg court from 1984 . In 1986 he began working as a human rights attorney for the Center for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) at the University of the Witwatersrand . He has defended many members of the ANC charged with treason in court. He also dealt with labor law , conscientious objection , land ownership and forced displacement, and discrimination against homosexuals . In 1989 he was appointed professor.

After the end of apartheid, Nelson Mandela appointed him on October 10, 1994 as acting judge at the Supreme Court and entrusted him with the chairmanship of a commission against the illegal arms trade . From January 1, 1995, he was and remained a permanent member of the court before moving to the Constitutional Court for a year in 1999. He then worked as a judge at the Court of Appeal from 2000 to 2008. In 2009 President Kgalema Motlanthe reappointed him as constitutional judge.

In addition to his work as a lawyer and judge, he has authored several books on labor law and the work of the British legal philosopher Tony Honoré . He sat on the board of directors of Witwatersrand University from 1998 to 2008, was co-founder and until 2005 chairman of the Witwatersrand University Law School Endowment Appeal and has been Secretary General of the Rhodes Trust in South Africa since 2003 .

activism

Cameron learned in 1986 that he was infected with the HI virus . Although he did not make this public, he campaigned against discrimination against HIV-positive and AIDS sufferers. He drafted a charter of rights, founded the AIDS Law Project, and co-founded an AIDS consortium.

The disease broke out 11 years later. Because AIDS was outlawed by the South African government and society at the time, he tried to hide his illness. His judge health insurance paid him expensive drugs for antiretroviral therapy , which the government banned as ineffective and dangerous. When his black compatriot Gugu Dlamini publicly confessed to her infection on the radio in 1998 and was subsequently stoned and stabbed by her neighbors in her township, Cameron began to rethink. At the International AIDS Conference in Durban in 2000 , he was the first high-ranking official to come out as being gay and suffering from AIDS.

He processed his experiences as an AIDS patient in South Africa in the book Witness to AIDS . He won the Alan Paton Award in 2006 . For his commitment he has received numerous awards such as the 2000 Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights, the 2003 Leadership Award of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and 2007 Zivilcouragepreis of Berlin's Christopher Street Day , presented by Federal Minister of Justice Brigitte Zypries . He is the winner of the 2009/10 Brudner Prize from Yale University . Since 2003 he has been an honorary fellow at Keble College in Oxford. In 2016 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He is also the patron of several AIDS projects.

Works

  • The New Labor Law: Strikes, Dismissals and the Unfair Labor Practice in South African Law. Juta, Johannesburg 1987. (with M. Brassey, H. Cheadle and M. Olivier)
  • The new Labor Relations Act: The law after the 1988 amendments. Juta, Johannesburg 1989.
  • Defiant Desire - Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa . Routledge, 1994. (with Mark Gevisser )
  • Honoré's South African Law of Trusts . Juta Legal and Academic Publishers, 2002. (together with MJ De Waal, E. Kahn, and P. Solomon)
  • Witness to AIDS . Tafelberg Publishers, 2005. (German: Tod in Afrika - Mein Leben gegen Aids. With a foreword by Nelson Mandela and contributions by Nathan Geffen . CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2007.)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences : Newly Elected Fellows. In: amacad.org. Retrieved April 22, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Cameron, Edwin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African lawyer, Constitutional Court judge and AIDS activist
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Pretoria