Seeming Retreat by Egypt Leader on New Powers

With public pressure mounting, President Mohamed Morsi appeared to pull back Monday from his attempt to assert an authority beyond the reach of any court. His allies in the Muslim Brotherhood canceled plans for a large demonstration in his support, signaling a chance to calm an escalating battle that has paralyzed a divided nation.

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.

Protesters remained camped in Tahrir Square, and the opposition was moving ahead with plans for a major demonstration on Tuesday.

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 former President Hosni 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 last 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 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.

Khaled Ali, a human rights lawyer and former presidential candidate, pointed to the growing crowd of protesters camped out in Tahrir Square for a fourth night. “The one who did the action has to take it back,” Mr. Ali said.

Moataz Abdel Fattah, a political scientist at Cairo University, said Mr. Morsi was saving face during a strategic retreat. “He is trying to simply say, ‘I am not a new pharaoh; I am just trying to stabilize the institutions that we already have,’ ” he said. “But for the liberals, this is now their moment, and for sure they are not going to waste it, because he has given them an excellent opportunity to score.”

The attempt to qualify Mr. Morsi’s position follows four days of rising tensions and flashes of violence set off by his edict. He argued that he was forced to act because of indications that the Mubarak-appointed judges of Egypt’s top courts were poised to dissolve the constitutional assembly as soon as next week. The courts had already shuttered the democratically elected Parliament and an earlier constitutional assembly — both dominated by Islamists — and the courts had also rejected an earlier decree he issued to try to reopen Parliament.

By enabling the current assembly to complete its work, Mr. Morsi said, he would expedite the transition to a stable democracy with a written constitution and an elected parliament that would limit his own powers. His supporters portrayed his assertion of executive power over the judges as a triumph of democracy over Egypt’s unelected arms of the old Mubarak government.

But infringement on the courts touched a nerve. Under Mr. Mubarak’s authoritarian rule, the Egyptians had grown cynical about corrupt and politicized judges but still cherished their courts as the source of at least the promise of impartial justice and some check on power. And over the past decade, a judges’ campaign for judicial independence had helped lay the groundwork for the 2011 revolt.

To his surprise, according to at least one adviser, Mr. Morsi’s decree exempting himself from judicial scrutiny set off a furious reaction. The president’s fractious political opponents galvanized together into a unified coalition against him. Vandals attacked more than a dozen headquarters of his political party. Thousands demonstrated in the streets. Judges called for a national strike, which has begun in some places.

And the justice minister, a former leader of the judicial independence movement, publicly dissented, arguing that Mr. Morsi should limit his attempt to assert immunity from judicial oversight to acts only related to protecting the constituent assembly or other elected bodies — something the clarification offered Monday appeared to do.

In Washington, a State Department spokeswoman said Monday that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had spoken about the decree on Monday with her Egyptian counterpart, Mohamed Amr. Mrs. Clinton had told him, “We want to see the constitutional process move forward in a way that does not overly concentrate power in one set of hands,” the spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said, and she suggested that the Egyptian government had offered signs that a compromise was in the works.

“Our understanding from the Egyptian side is that there are now discussions ongoing among a number of the stakeholders, that President Morsi is conducting consultations with various groups, including with the judiciary,” Ms. Nuland said. The clarification Mr. Morsi offered on Monday also pulled back one of the most popular elements of his decree. He had called for retrials for officials of the former government, including Mr. Mubarak, accused of directing the killing of civilians during the revolt. Many Egyptians have been outraged at acquittals or what they consider to be inadequate sentences handed down in such trials; Mr. Mubarak’s life sentence was accompanied by a convoluted court statement that appeared to pave the way for a release on appeal.

But on Monday, Mr. Morsi’s spokesman said the president’s decree had not meant to provide new trials for the same crimes, a violation of Egyptian and international law. Instead, the spokesman said the decree had only meant to provide for new trials if new evidence emerged. That is already a part of Egyptian law, so the clarification rendered that provision of the decree moot.

Mr. Morsi’s decree had also sought to replace the Mubarak-appointed chief prosecutor, who was widely blamed for failing to pursue corrupt Mubarak government officials aggressively. But Egyptian law had blocked Mr. Morsi from removing him. It was unclear whether Mr. Morsi would now argue that replacing the chief prosecutor was justified as an “act of sovereignty,” the doctrine the spokesman cited to justify immunity from judicial scrutiny of other presidential edicts “to protect the main institutions of the state.”

Hossam Bahgat, executive director of a human rights group that has filed a lawsuit challenging the decree as unlawful, said he had “more questions than answers” after the statement. “Right now, these are just verbal explanations that contradict the written word of the declaration, so that discrepancy needs to be settled,” he said.

In a television interview, Hisham Raouf, an assistant to the minister of justice and the president of the court of appeals, described the spokesman’s statements as an “explanation memorandum” that complemented the original decree. He acknowledged that the explanation made much of the decree superfluous because the spokesman had asserted that all the powers the president claimed were already found in longstanding Egyptian legal doctrine.

But he said the explanation was a step forward because without it, the decree suggested that until the passage of a new constitution any act Mr. Morsi took was beyond judicial scrutiny. Now, courts would decide what qualified as a “sovereign act,” he said, adding that all sides had to accept small compromises because “the crisis isn’t small.”