Edwin Cameron SCOB (born 15 February 1953 in Pretoria) is a retired judge who served as a Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He is well known for his HIV/AIDS and gay-rights activism and was hailed by Nelson Mandela as "one of South Africa's new heroes". President Ramaphosa appointed him as Inspecting Judge of Correctional Services from 1 January 2020 and in October 2019 he was elected Chancellor of Stellenbosch University. Early life Cameron was born in Pretoria. His father was imprisoned for car theft and his mother did not have the means to support him. He therefore spent much of his childhood in an orphanage in Queenstown. His elder sister was killed when Cameron was seven. Cameron won a scholarship to attend Pretoria Boys High School, one of South Africa's best state schools, and reinvented himself, he says, "in the guise of a clever schoolboy". Thereafter he went to Stellenbosch University, studying Latin and classics. Here he stayed at Wilgenhof Mens Residence. After this he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. There he switched to law and earned a BA in Jurisprudence and the Bachelor of Civil Law, winning the Vinerian Scholarship. When he returned to South Africa he completed an LLB at the University of South Africa and was its best law graduate. Cameron's early career combined academia and legal practice. In 1982, he famously wrote a scathing critique of the late Chief Justice L. C. Steyn, then a darling of the apartheid establishment. And, in 1987, Cameron argued that three senior South African judges, including its former Chief Justice, Pierre Rabie, ought to resign to preserve the legitimacy of the judiciary. Cameron practised at the Johannesburg Bar from 1983 to 1994. From 1986 he was a human rights lawyer at Wits's Centre for Applied Legal Studies, where in 1989 he was awarded a personal professorship in law. Cameron's practice included labour and employment law; defence of African National Congress fighters charged with treason; conscientious and religious objection; land tenure and forced removals; and gay and lesbian equality. In 1992 he became a co-author (with Tony Honoré, one of his mentors at Oxford) of Honoré's South African Law of Trusts. Cameron took silk in 1994. Judicial career High Court In October 1994, President Nelson Mandela appointed Cameron as an acting judge of the High Court to chair a commission of inquiry into illegal arms sales