Legal and Human Rights Responses to the HIV/AIDS Epidemic (lecture, 12 October 2005)

• Jurisdiction: South Africa
• Published date: 27 May 2019
• Date: 27 May 2019
• Author: Edwin Cameron
• Pages: 37-46
• Citation: (2006) 17 Stell LR 37

LEGAL AND HUMAN RIGHTS RESPONSES TO

THE HIV/AIDS EPIDEMIC (Lecture, 12 October 2005)

*

Edwin Cameron

Hons BA LLB BCL MA

Judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal

It is a great pleasure to be here tonight. As an oud-Matie law

undergraduate, I count it an honour that Professor Sandra Liebenberg,

Professor of Human Rights Law, has invited me back to speak in this

venue. For me its memories are rich, intense and varied, since I made my

first academic acquaintance with the law as a first-year student in this

very room. And I am privileged to have a continuing academic

association with the Faculty: your new Dean, Professor Marius de Waal,

was my principal co-author in the fifth edition of Honore

´’s South African

Law of Trusts (2002) — to which he brought his meticulous care,

generosity of both spirit and scholarship, and his intellectual distinction.

With tonight’s occasion in mind, I have prepared a detailed exposition

of legal and human rights responses to the AIDS epidemic in this country

over the past fifteen years. This paper is available on the Stellenbosch

Law Faculty’s website.

But I do not want to burden our time together this evening with the

grey detail of legislation, legal measures and lawyers’ debates. Instead, I

want to try to place all those laws and measures and debates in an overall

perspective within the AIDS epidemic. How do we understand the

epidemic and the momentous challenges it poses to us?

From the first official reports of AIDS cases at the end of June 1981,

nearly 25 years ago, it has been plain that AIDS would not be ‘‘just’’ a

disease: it would not be analysed and treated according to straightfor-

ward scientific and medical precepts as a bodily manifestation of a viral

infection.

Instead, its management would be beset by political controversy,

clouded by stigma, burdened by moralistic overlay and obscured by

pseudo-scientific misconceptions.

A quarter of a century later, this is regrettably still the case. Yet AIDS

remains a disease. Beyond the stigmas, the metaphors, the constrictive

moralising, and the perverse epistemologies, it is after all the bodily

manifestation of a viral infection.

To manage its effects, we must surely first understand its environ-

mental and social determinants: that is elementary about all disease. But

with AIDS, the very proble m has been that all too often those

* Text of a Prestige Lecture delivered at the Faculty of Law, University of Stellenbosch on Wednesday 12

October 2005.

37

(2006) 17 Stell LR 37

© Juta and Company (Pty) Ltd