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Justice Edwin Cameron is a well-known
public figure in South Africa.
He was also the first public-office bearer in that country
to make his HIV status public in 2000.
So, when he chose to speak to the participants of the workshops
conducted under the EU-India Media Initiative on HIV/AIDS
(MIHA), 2006, in an ‘as live’ recorded interview, it
was a moving experience.
Cameron explained how he has been living
a healthy life for the last 20 years on anti-retroviral
treatment (ART) and how he has overcome the fear of
stigma and the opportunistic illnesses associated with AIDS.
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Cameron strongly believes that human life
forces are stronger than the individual effects of HIV and
the realization that one is infected is only a signal to fight
back in full throttle. It is a signal that he himself responded
to by penning the story of his survival in his memoirs, ‘Witness
to AIDS’, published in 2005. What he achieved was hope
in the face of a pandemic that has taken millions of lives.
“I
knew that I had AIDS when I could no longer climb the stairs
from the judges’ common room in the High Court to my chambers
two floors above... I was perspiring grey exhaustion. My lungs
felt water-logged, my mouth rough and dry. No pain. Just overwhelming
weariness… To stop work would be to admit defeat. And admitting
defeat meant death,” he writes in ‘Witness in AIDS’. |
Cameron is a fine scholar, a renowned judge in the Supreme
Court of Appeal, South Africa, and, above all, an internationally
respected human rights lawyer and AIDS campaigner. He was
awarded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation
Excellence in Leadership Award in 2003.He has visited
India several times when he met up with government ministers,
prominent lawyers, chief ministers of several states in order
to influence their attitude towards HIV/AIDS. |
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Justice
Cameron's message to Indian Journalists. Click here
to listen. |
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