MOSCOW, November 26 - RAPSI. Twenty five Egyptian advocacy groups joined forces to file a lawsuit seeking the annulment of a decree handed down last Thursday by President Mohammed Morsi that has sparked violent protests in the nation’s capital.

According to a press release issued shortly after the filing by renowned Egyptian human rights organization the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), the claim was filed with the Court of Administrative Justice. In addition to an annulment, the claimants seek the decree’s suspension through an expedited injunction, and urge the court to schedule a hearing as soon as possible.

The decree temporarily expands the scope of Morsi’s powers, barring the courts from challenging his decisions. As explained by CIHRS, the decree started out nobly enough, glorifying the revolution and the principles that it stood for, “[h]owever, contrary to these initial statements, the articles of the declaration entrench tyranny and one-man rule, giving the president – in addition to the executive and legislative powers which he already held – the authority to interfere in the judiciary as well.  The balance and separation of powers in Egypt has thereby been utterly demolished.”

The claimants to the lawsuit are a group of 25 advocacy groups, championing a variety of causes ranging from general human rights to legal reform to environmentalism to the rights of women and children.

The lawsuit classifies the decree as, “a set of despotic provisions that undermine judicial independence, erode sovereignty of the law as the basis of governance, and suspend the right to access to courts by retroactively immunizing all actions of the head of the executive authority from judicial review. The provisions also subvert the principles of criminal justice and the right to fair trial and interfere in the course of justice by preventing judicial bodies from considering cases pending before them.”