Cairo: Egyptian President Mohammad Mursi has agreed to limit the application of a decree, granting him sweeping powers, to “sovereign matters”, according to an aide, in a step unlikely to satisfy the opposition.
“The president assured to the [Supreme Judicial] Council that the immunization of his decisions, mentioned in the constitutional declaration, is limited to sovereign matters only,” the presidential spokesman Yasser Ali said on Monday night, following crisis talks between Mursi and members of Egypt’s highest judicial authority.
Mursi, Egypt’s first elected Islamist president, Thursday issued a decree making all his decisions and laws exempted of judicial review or legal challenge.
The decree also includes a bar on courts to dissolve an Islamist-controlled assembly writing a new constitution and the upper house of parliament. Mursi already holds the legislative authority after Egypt’s highest court invalidated the lower house of parliament in mid-June.
“These [measures] are temporary until a new constitution takes effect and the People’s Assembly [the legislature] is elected,” said the spokesman.
He quoted Mursi as “clarifying” to the judges that a retrial, previously ordered by Mursi for former officials, cleared of involvement in attacking protesters, would be limited to cases in which new evidence is found.
However, Ali ruled out any amendment to the constitutional declaration, which has sharply divided Egypt and triggered street violence between opponents and supporters.
Several protest groups plan on Tuesday a massive rally in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to push Mursi to rescind the declaration.
The opposition has condemned the move as a “coup against legitimacy and democracy”. Mursi and his backers, meanwhile, advocated the decree as aimed at protecting the uprising that toppled his predecessor Hosni Mubarak more than a year ago.
Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood has cancelled a plan to stage a big demonstration in his support that was scheduled for Tuesday.
The move came to avoid fuelling “street tensions”, according to a senior official in the group. “Cancelling the million-strong rally also aims at giving the president the full chance to reach an understanding with the political powers,” added Mahmoud Ghouzlan, the spokesman for the Brotherhood.
Opposition leaders have said they will not hold talks with Mursi before he reverses the decree.
