Book Review - Human Rights Overboard

Susan Harris Rimmer, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights

Abstract

Human Rights Overboard: Seeking Asylum in Australia by Linda Briskman, Susie Latham and Chris Goddard, with a foreword by Julian Burnside, Scribe Press, 2008.

If I let my inner dictator loose, every person in Australia would be forced to read this book, while listening to the Paul Kelly song "I get a little emotional sometimes". Human Rights Overboard is a collection of the oral testimony and written submissions from the People's Inquiry into Detention, established by the Australian Council of Heads of Schools of Social Work in 2005. The Inquiry was partly in response to the Cornelia Rau affair, whose harrowing story begins the book.