Edwin Cameron

Edwin Cameron has been a Justice of South Africa’s highest court, the Constitutional Court, since 1 January 2009. He studied at Stellenbosch and at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. During apartheid he was a human rights lawyer. President Mandela appointed him a judge in 1994. Before the Constitutional Court, he was a Judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal for eight years, and a Judge of the High Court for six.
He was an outspoken critic of President Mbeki’s AIDS-denialist policies. His prize-winning memoir, Witness to AIDS, has been published in South Africa, the UK, the US and in translation in Germany and in China. He chaired the governing council of the University of the Witwatersrand for more than ten years (1998-2008), and remains involved in many charitable and public causes.

His latest book, Justice: A Personal Account (2014) won the South African Literary Award for creative non-fiction in 2015. It has been translated and will shortly be published in Korea.

He has received many honours for his work, including a special award by the Bar of England and Wales for his ‘contribution to international jurisprudence and the protection of human rights’ (2002).
He is an honorary fellow of Keble College, Oxford (2003), and an honorary bencher of the Middle Temple, London (2008).
He holds honorary degrees from King’s College London (2008), University of the Witwatersrand (2009), Oxford (2011), St Andrews (2012), Stellenbosch (2015) and Sussex (2016).