Egypt justice minister says solution to crisis over Morsi power grab imminent

President Mohammed Morsi speaks to supporters outside the Presidential palace in Cairo, Egypt, Nov. 23, 2012. /AP

CAIROEgypt's justice minister said Monday a resolution was imminent to the political crisis stemming from the president's move to give himself sweeping new powers.

Ahmed Mekki spoke to reporters hours before President Mohammed Morsi was due to meet members of the Supreme Judiciary Council to discuss the package of decrees announced Thursday. Morsi's move put him above any kind of oversight, including that of the courts. The judiciary council is in charge of the courts.

Mekki has been mediating between the judiciary and the presidency to defuse the crisis, although he did not say on what he based his prediction for its imminent resolution.

The opposition denounced the decrees as dictatorial, and vowed to press on with street protests until Morsi rescinds them.

CBS News correspondent Holly Williams reports low-level violence continued on Monday as opposition protesters clashed with police, exchanging volleys of projectiles and tear gas. She says Morsi's stance did seem to soften slightly overnight, after the Egyptian stock market plummeted and three senior advisors resigned over the crisis.

The problem, says Williams, is that Morsi's entrenched opponents, some of those camped out in Tahrir square, say nothing will satisfy them short of the complete repeal of decree.

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Escalating protests in Cairo

The presidents supporters and opponents only grew more entrenched in their potentially destabilizing battle over the Islamist leader's move on Sunday, with neither side appearing willing to back down as the stock market plunged amid the fresh turmoil.

The standoff poses one of the hardest tests for the nation's liberal and secular opposition since Hosni Mubarak's ouster nearly two years ago. Failure to sustain protests and eventually force Morsi to loosen control could consign it to long-term irrelevance.

Clashes between the two sides spilled onto the streets for a third day Sunday.

A teenager was killed and at least 60 people were wounded when a group of anti-Morsi protesters tried to storm the local offices of the political arm of the president's Muslim Brotherhood in the Nile Delta city of Damanhoor, according to security officials.

It was the first reported death from the street battles that erupted across much of the nation on Friday, the day after Morsi's decrees were announced. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, identified the boy as 15-year-old Islam Hamdi Abdel-Maqsood.

The judiciary, the main target of the edicts, has pushed back, calling the decrees a power grab and an "assault" on the branch's independence. Judges and prosecutors stayed away from many courts in Cairo and other cities on Sunday.

But the nation's highest judicial body, the Supreme Judiciary Council, watered down its opposition to the decrees on Sunday. It told judges and prosecutors to return to work and announced the Monday meeting with Morsi to try to persuade him to restrict immunity to major state decisions like declaring war or martial law or breaking diplomatic relations with foreign nations.

Morsi supporters insist that the measures were necessary to prevent the courts, which already dissolved the elected lower house of parliament, from further holding up moves to stability by disbanding the assembly writing the new constitution, as judges were considering doing. Both the parliament and the constitutional assembly are dominated by Islamists. Morsi accuses Mubarak loyalists in the judiciary of seeking to thwart the revolution's goals and barred the judiciary from disbanding the constitutional assembly or parliament's upper house.