CAIRO — Demonstrators began flowing into the streets of Cairo on Tuesday for a day of protest against President Mohamed Morsi’s effort to assert broad new powers, dismissing his efforts only hours before to reaffirm his deference to Egyptian law and courts.
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the headquarters of the lawyers’ trade group as others milled around a small tent city erected in Tahrir Square, both groups echoing the chants of the uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak almost two years ago.
“Leave, leave!” they chanted, referring to Mr. Morsi. “Bring down the regime.”
A few blocks away, in a square near both the American Embassy and the Interior Ministry, groups of young men resumed a nine-day-old battle with riot police, responding to tear gas canisters with rocks.
Although the clashes grew out of anger over the deaths of dozens of protesters in similar clashes one year ago, the rowdy and often apolitical combatants have adopted the banner of protest against Mr. Morsi as well.
Larger crowds were expected in the evening as marches from around the city headed for Tahrir Square — the focal point of Egyptian protests — at the end of the working day.
Many schools and other businesses had closed in anticipation of violence in the streets.
The Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group allied with Mr. Morsi, called off a rival protest, saying it sought to avert violence between the groups. And the leader of Al Azhar, the center of Sunni Muslim learning that is regarded as the pre-eminent moral authority here, met with groups of political leaders in an effort to resolve the battle over the president’s decree and the deadlock in the constitutional assembly that has snarled Egypt’s political transition 22 months after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster.
On Monday, with public pressure mounting, Mr. Morsi appeared to pull back from his effort to assert an authority beyond the reach of any court.
After Mr. Morsi met for hours with the judges of Egypt’s Supreme Judicial Council, his spokesman read an “explanation” on television that appeared to backtrack from a presidential decree placing Mr. Morsi’s official edicts above judicial scrutiny — even while saying the president had not actually changed a word of the statement.
Though details of the talks remained hazy, and it was not clear whether the opposition or the court would accept his position, Mr. Morsi’s gesture was another demonstration that Egyptians would no longer allow their rulers to operate above the law. But there appeared little chance that the gesture alone would be enough to quell the crisis set off by his perceived power grab.
The presidential spokesman, Yasser Ali, said for the first time that Mr. Morsi had sought only to assert pre-existing powers already approved by the courts under previous precedents, not to free himself from judicial oversight.
He said that the president meant all along to follow an established Egyptian legal doctrine suspending judicial scrutiny of presidential “acts of sovereignty” that work “to protect the main institutions of the state.” The judicial council had said Sunday that it could bless aspects of the decree deemed to qualify under the doctrine.
Mr. Morsi had maintained from the start that his purpose was to empower himself to prevent judges appointed by Mr. Mubarak from dissolving the constituent assembly, which is led by his fellow Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. The courts have already dissolved the Islamist-led Parliament and an earlier constituent assembly, and the Supreme Constitutional Court was widely expected to rule against this one next week.
But the text of the original decree had exempted all presidential edicts from judicial review until the ratification of a constitution, not just those edicts related to the assembly or justified as “acts of sovereignty.”
Legal experts said that the spokesman’s explanations of the president’s intentions, if put into effect, would amount to a revision of the decree Mr. Morsi issued on Thursday. But lawyers said that the verbal statements alone carried little legal weight.
How the courts would apply the doctrine remained hard to predict. And Mr. Morsi’s opposition indicated it was holding out for far greater concessions, including the breakup of the whole constituent assembly.
Speaking at a news conference Monday while Mr. Morsi was meeting with the judges, the opposition activist and intellectual Abdel Haleem Qandeil called for “a long-term battle,” declaring that withdrawal of Mr. Morsi’s new powers was only the first step toward the opposition’s goal of “the withdrawal of the legitimacy of Morsi’s presence in the presidential palace.” Completely withdrawing the edict would be “a minimum,” he said.
Anti-Morsi Protesters Gather on Cairo Streets
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Anti-Morsi Protesters Gather on Cairo Streets
