When Human rights activist and former Justice, Edwin Cameron, publicly disclosed his HIV positive status, he says "worse than the sense of the death sentence of HIV, was my sense of shame". In a talk that is as poignant and vulnerable as necessary, he focuses on his experiences reconciling the injustice of external discrimination with his internal values, showing us how shame still exists in the epidemic of HIV in the African continent. Edwin Cameron was a Justice of South Africa’s highest court, the Constitutional Court, for ten years until the 20 August 2019, and was appointed by President Mandela as a judge in 1994. Before the Constitutional Court, he was in the Supreme Court of Appeal for eight years, and in the High Court for six. He was educated at Pretoria Boys’ High School, Stellenbosch and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
During apartheid he was a human rights lawyer. Edwin was a powerful critic of President Mbeki’s AIDS-denialist policies. His prize-winning memoir Witness to AIDS, was published in South Africa, the UK, the USA and in translation in Germany and China. Justice: A Personal Account (2014) won the South African Literary Award for creative non-fiction in 2016. He also chaired the governing council of the University of the Witwatersrand for more than ten years and remains involved in many charitable and public causes. He has received many honours for his legal and human rights work. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx