Carol palmer, the top civil servant in the Ministry of Justice, has given the two political parties sound advice during this election.

As was reported by this newspaper yesterday, she has told them not to politicise the justice reform programme that was recently launched and is now being prepared for implementation. That, indeed, is advice which should be adopted by all Jamaica, including the formal private sector, which has significant influence over the formation and conduct of policy.

This newspaper, as we expect to be the attitude of most fair-minded people, has confidence in the integrity of the Jamaican judiciary and the overall quality of jurisprudence available in the country and the wider English-speaking Caribbean. Which is why we would have no problem with Jamaica proceeding to membership of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as its court of last resort, replacing the Privy Council in England.

We do, however, as we have said before, have significant problems with the administration of justice in Jamaica. The system is inherently stacked against the poor and many of its processes are archaic, unwieldy and slow. Reform has to take place on two broad fronts, the first of which Mrs. Palmer addressed: the physical, institutional and managerial adjustments that essentially form the package of recommendations from the reform task force.

The other is more subtle and rather more difficult to achieve. Shorn to its core, it can be expressed in a single word: respect! That is in the way the justice system interfaces with and treats those without wealth and power, but are more often than not in contact with the forces of law and justice. Justice, ostensibly, is blind to all before it, applying only the scale of the law. The process, frankly, peeps from behind the blindfold, weighing heavily against the poor who can ill-afford to pay for many of its services and the social and class bias that is systemically elitist.

Change, here, is more difficult. But there can be some compensation, a levelling out of the biases, if the other things work; if, for instance, the rules of habeas corpus are strictly adhered to; if technology is introduced to the courtrooms to improve the efficiency with which judges proceed with their work; if the managerial systems are in place to track performance against targets.

The private sector has a stake in ensuring that such reforms take place and work, given that effective and speedy resolution of legal disputes is critical to the expansion of commerce. For, as anyone in business knows, time eventually translates into money and as Hugh Small showed in his recent speech to the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica, the island's courts are far from speedy in resolving commercial disputes.

It is in all our interest, therefore, that, as Mrs. Palmer hopes, the justice reform matter does not become a ping-pong item during the rest of the campaign. It would be a shame, given that all sides appeared to have bought into reforms, if campaign rhetoric locks them into positions that would demand a new round of debate on what is to be done in the post-election period. The debate should now be about commitment to allocate the resources to get the job done.

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