Justice Edwin Cameron is the Inspecting Judge of the South African Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services and was previously Justice of South Africa’s Constitutional Court.

Justice Cameron is an outstanding human rights lawyer who has made and continues to make a huge contribution to international jurisprudence and the protection of equality and human rights.

Edwin has provided regular support for Birkbeck’ ICPR prisons research since providing a foreword to a report and delivering the annual ICPR lecture: ‘Do prisons work? If not, do prisons inspectorates do more harm than good?’ (18 January 2022)

Openly gay since the early 1980s, he was the first and is still the only senior African official to state publicly that he is living with HIV/AIDS, and was hailed by Nelson Mandela as one of South Africa’s new heroes. Edwin has been a tireless campaigner for equality for LGBTQ people and people living with HIV/AIDS. He drafted the country’s Charter of Rights on AIDS and HIV, co-founded the AIDS Consortium (a national affiliation of non-governmental organizations), and founded and directed the AIDS Law Project. This, with other work, helped secure the express inclusion of sexual orientation in the South African Constitution.