South African president Kgalema Motlanthe has appointed openly gay and HIV-positive judge Edwin Cameron to the nation’s highest court.

According to the The Star, Cameron was considered for the Constitutional Court nearly a decade ago, but then-deputy president Thabo Mbeki blocked the appointment.

Speaking to The Star yesterday, Achmat said he believed that Mbeki’s controversial sidelining of Judge Cameron was “one of the best things that could have happened … although we didn’t think so at the time”.

His appointment “comes at a time when the Constitutional Court needs judges who will continue its legacy of independence and rigour,” Achmat said.

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The road to the Constitutional Court wasn’t an easy one for Judge Cameron, who was grilled by the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) about his Aids activism when he was interviewed.
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The judge was also the subject of a scathing 22-page submission by former pension funds adjudicator Vuyani Ngalwana, who argued that certain of his rulings on rape sentencing had been soft.

He also took issue with Judge Cameron’s “public address on the issue of HIV/Aids”.

Praised by Nelson Mandela as “one of South Africa’s new heroes”, Judge Cameron was the first judge to disclose that he was HIV-positive.

In an interview with the BBC, he explained that he was inspired to speak out by the death of Gugu Dlamini, who was stoned and stabbed to death three weeks after she had admitted on isi- Zulu-language radio that she was HIV-positive.

“I thought that if this woman, without any protection, living in a township, not behind a palisade like I do in my middle-class suburb in Joburg, not with the income of a judge, not with the constitutional protection … I thought that I should speak out,” he said.