CAIRO: The court-appointed legal team representing deposed Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi filed an appeal Saturday at the country’s highest court challenging sentences of life imprisonment and death handed down in June, Morsi’s lawyer said. The Cairo criminal court sentenced Morsi to death over a mass jailbreak during the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak as well as life imprisonment for giving state secrets to Qatar. It also issued sweeping punishments against the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s oldest Islamic group.

The general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammad Badie, and four other leaders were also handed the death penalty. More than 90 others, including influential cleric Youssef al-Qaradawi, were sentenced to death in absentia.

The sentences were part of a crackdown launched after an army takeover stripped Morsi of power in 2013 after protests against his rule.

The government has declared the Brotherhood a terrorist group and has accused it of fomenting an Islamist insurgency since Morsi’s removal, but the group has said it is committed to political change through peaceful means only.

Morsi has not appointed a lawyer to defend himself and has refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court proceedings, saying he remains the legitimate president of the country.

The government has said the judiciary is independent and it never intervenes in its work.

Meanwhile, Egypt hit back at a call by Human Rights Watch for an international investigation into the killing of hundreds of pro-Morsi protesters in Cairo by security forces two years ago.

The Foreign Ministry criticized the New York-based watchdog’s report on the deaths of the supporters in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square as “politicized and lacking objectivity.”

Egypt’s government has defended the dispersal as necessary to tackle armed “terrorists,” and it brushed aside HRW’s appeal for the U.N. Human Rights Council to set up an international commission of inquiry.

“The call for an international investigation into the dispersal of the Rabaa sit-in is even more ludicrous because it is issued by an organization that has never expressed any interest in the soldiers, police and civilian victims of terrorism in Egypt,” a Foreign Ministry statement said.

“The organization insists on ignoring the terrorist nature of the movement that it defends,” it added, pointing to the Muslim Brotherhood.

At least 600 people were killed during the operation in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square on Aug. 14, 2013, according to official figures. HRW says at least 800 died.

No policemen have faced trial over the deaths.

About 10 police were killed during the dispersal, after coming under fire from gunmen in the sprawling camp.

Rights groups accused police of using disproportionate force, killing unarmed protesters in what HRW said “probably amounted to crimes against humanity.”