There are many bad things that can be said about the state of public security, law enforcement and the justice system in Jamaica, but what would hardly be credible is that the Jamaican judiciary is institutionally corrupt.

That, though, is one of the implied charges in Amnesty International's latest report on the state of human rights in Jamaica, in which it accuses the Jamaican State of being complicit, almost deliberately, in the murder of its citizens in the island's inner-city communities.

In the document titled 'Let Them Kill Each Other: Public Security In Jamaica's Inner Cities', Amnesty suggests that the Jamaican Government has effectively abandoned security in the so-called garrison areas. The police are accused of extrajudicial killings.

Significantly, and as it ought to be, Amnesty researchers delivered their report unimpeded at a press conference in Kingston - as they have done in the past when their analyses of the state of human rights in Jamaica were even more scathing. But back to the judiciary. In the general recounting of Jamaica's perceived failure to uphold the human rights of its citizens, especially the poorest and most deprived among them, Amnesty makes the following statement: "Experts in Jamaica have also suggested that judges in Jamaica frequently lack impartiality and independence when confronted with police killing cases."

Unfortunately, neither the experts nor the specific cases in which judges were partial were identified. But, taken to its logical conclusion, this is a charge of corruption, which is what a judge is guilty of when he or she abandons the fundamental tenet of the profession: impartiality. And that corruption, once it happens, is not halfway, limited only by the judiciary's involvement with the constabulary.

Nor is it enough for Amnesty to hide behind the ephemeral "experts in Jamaica" for this impugning of the judiciary without having itself to offer real evidence for the claim. The point is that there are real problems with the judicial system, its inefficiency and its weight against the poor without undermining it further with unsubstantiated and unfounded statements about an institution that remains intact, with its integrity whole.

But that having been said, this Amnesty report, for its many hyperbolic statements about the situation in Jamaica, and in too many instances, naive assessment of social and political relations in the country, is perhaps the most balanced so far delivered on the island.

It acknowledges the efforts of the "new government" to address the corruption and impunity in the constabulary as well as concedes that guns, used for 90 per cent of the murders in Jamaica, are mostly smuggled into the country - that arms trafficking is an international problem. It concedes that being a police officer in Jamaica can be a dangerous job.

All this, however, does not obviate the need for the Jamaican State, no matter the difficulties, to ensure the security of its citizens and their protection by the security forces.

But anyone who looks at these things, as well as incapacity or failure of the Jamaican State to deliver improved services to all its citizens, can't do so in the absence of Prime Minister Bruce Golding's observation about the national debt, which requires over 60 per of the budget to service.

Clearly, political will is necessary to address Jamaica's security problems - as well as social consensus and balanced analyses.