had the pleasure of hosting  Justice Edwin Cameron

Edwin Cameron was appointed a Justice of South Africa’s highest court, the Constitutional Court, from 1 January 2009.

He was educated at Pretoria Boys’ High School, Stellenbosch and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and won the top academic awards.

During apartheid he was a leading human rights lawyer. President Mandela appointed him a judge in 1994.

He was a powerful critic of President Mbeki’s AIDS-denialist policies and wrote a prize-winning memoir, Witness to AIDS, which has been published in South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany – and has just been published in China in a full translation.

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.

He has received many honours for his legal and human rights work, including a special award by the Bar of England and Wales in 2002 for his ‘contribution to international jurisprudence and the protection of human rights’.

He has been elected an honorary fellow of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies, London, an honorary fellow of Keble College Oxford (2003), and an honorary bencher of the Middle Temple, London (2008).

At the end of 2008, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and King’s College London, resolved to confer honorary doctorates in law on him.