Morsi assumes broader powers - FT.com Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's Islamist president, has issued a constitutional declaration granting himself wide-ranging powers and immunising all his decisions to legal challenges. The move on Thursday drew immediate fire from domestic critics who accused the president of seeking to usurp state power and launch a dictatorship. Mr Morsi ordered the reopening of all cases relating to attacks on demonstrators - a move aimed at absorbing anger on the streets, which has led to a fresh eruption of unrest and fighting between protesters and police this week. But he combined this decision with far more controversial measures, including forbidding the courts from disbanding both the controversial panel drafting the constitution and the Shura council or upper chamber of parliament elected last year. These two bodies, dominated by Islamists from Mr Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood group, are the target of legal challenges. The courts had this year ordered the dissolution of parliament, also controlled by Islamists, and overruled a decision by the president to restore it. Brotherhood officials have charged that parts of the judiciary were politicised and seeking to undermine the democratic transition. The decisions, read on television by Yasser Ali, Mr Morsi's spokesman, were cast as the president's duty to "achieve the aims of the revolution, especially those related to dismantling the infrastructure of the former regime . . . and vanquishing [those who are] its tools in the state and in society." But Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate and Egyptian opposition leader, tweeted: "Morsi today usurped all state powers and appointed himself Egypt's new pharaoh. A major blow to the revolution that could have dire consequences. The president has also extended, by two months until mid-February, the deadline for the constitutional panel to complete the charter. Liberal members of the body and those representing the country's three churches pulled out this week, protesting that their concerns were being ignored. They fear that the charter will give religion a greater role in governance and not go far enough in protecting freedoms. In a move that is bound to infuriate the judiciary, Mr Morsi also sacked Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, the attorney-general, and appointed a replacement. The prosecutor, who was appointed by Hosni Mubarak, the president toppled by a popular uprising last year, has been the target of popular ire because of the failure of the prosecution service to secure convictions in numerous trials of policemen accused of killing demonstrators during the revolt. Mr Morsi was stymied in an attempt to remove him last month because under Egyptian law the state prosecutor cannot be sacked. The president tried to ease out Mr Mahmoud by pressing him to accept an ambassadorship to the Vatican, provoking uproar from critics who accused the president of overstepping his authority and trying to impose his will on the judiciary. "These are dictatorial decisions," said Gamal Eid, a human rights lawyer. I cannot say yet that we are living in a dictatorship, but these are not the decisions of an elected president. They are more fitting for a leader who came through a coup. Even before Mr Morsi's decisions were announced, the Muslim Brotherhood had sent its members to demonstrate outside the High Court where Mr Mahmoud has his offices in support of the president. Wael Ghoneim, the Google executive who ran the Facebook group that was instrumental in mobilising last year's revolution, also tweeted his disapproval. "The president had other alternatives to the decisions he made today which would have achieved his aims to protect the gains of the revolution ... but sadly he chose the dictatorial solution [as if to say] "all powers are with me and no Egyptian has the right to object to anything I do.""