The Plenary Lecture will be given by Edwin Cameron, Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and will take place on Wednesday 13th April at 14.00h; and we are delighted to announce that Simon Fanshawe will be chairing the session.
Edwin Cameron was appointed a Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, South Africa’s highest court, from 1 January 2009.
Before that, he was a judge in the Supreme Court of Appeal for eight years, and a High Court judge for six.
He was educated at Pretoria Boys’ High School and Stellenbosch University. There he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he gained the top academic awards in law.
He joined the Johannesburg Bar in 1983, and from 1986 practised as a human rights lawyer from the University of the Witwatersrand's Centre for Applied Legal Studies, where he was awarded a personal professorship in law. His practice included labour and employment law, defence of ANC fighters charged with treason, conscientious and religious objection, land tenure and forced removals, and gay and lesbian equality.
In 1994, President Mandela appointed him an acting judge and then a permanent judge of the High Court from 1995.
Justice Cameron has received many awards, among them Honorary Fellowships of Keble College, Oxford and of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies, London; the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights (2000); Stellenbosch University's Alumnus Award (2000), Transnet's HIV/AIDS Champions Award and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation's Excellence in Leadership Award (2003).
In 2002 the Bar of England and Wales honored him with a special award for his “contribution to international jurisprudence and the protection of human rights”.
His memoir, Witness to AIDS, was awarded South Africa's most prestigious literary award for non-fiction, the Sunday Times/Alan Paton prize (2006).
In 2009, he was installed as an honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple. He holds honorary doctorates from King’s College London and the University of the Witwatersrand.
