London:
Facing his most crucial legal battle so far, Julian Assange, the founder of the antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks, appeared on Monday at a hearing to decide whether he will be extradited to Sweden to face accusations of sexual abuse.
The two-day hearing, which began with detailed procedural arguments at Woolwich Crown Court, was the culmination of an acrimonious public battle between Mr. Assange and prosecutors in Sweden who have, since last October, sought to question him about accusations of unlawful coercion, sexual molestation and rape made by two women in Stockholm last summer.
Wearing a blue suit and a red tie, Mr. Assange sat implacably as details of the accusations were read out.
Swedish authorities challenged Mr. Assange's assertion that, if extradited to Sweden, he might face illegal rendition to the United States. Claire Montgomery, a lawyer acting for the Swedish government, said his argument hinged "on a factual hypothesis that has not yet been established as a real risk."
Geoffrey Robertson, a member of Mr. Assange's defense team, said the main plank of his argument would be that, because Sweden has a policy of hearing sexual charges in closed court, justice "cannot be done." Given the intense news media coverage of the case, he said, even if Mr. Assange were ultimately cleared, "the stigma will remain."
Smiling and looking relaxed, Mr. Assange arrived at the courthouse about half an hour before the hearing was scheduled to begin and joined a line of people passing through security checks. The hearing is being held at Belmarsh, a bleak, concrete building in southeast London adjacent to a high-security prison often used to detain terrorism suspects.
Scores of television satellite vans, photographers and journalists arrived to chronicle the hearings while antiwar demonstrators gathered nearby, reciting the names of the 350 Britons killed in the Afghanistan war, where British soldiers form the second biggest contingent after the much larger American deployment.
Mr. Assange, who was briefly jailed in relation to the accusations when he was initially denied bail late last year, has denied any wrongdoing, though he admits to consensual sexual relations with the two women, both volunteers for WikiLeaks.
Now electronically tagged while on bail, and confined to the plush country mansion of a friend while the legal proceedings continue, he has characterized the charges as a smear campaign by unidentified forces to thwart his work in leaking hundreds of thousands of classified United States government and military documents. It is an argument that has found favor among celebrity supporters like the filmmaker Michael Moore and throngs of strident free speech protesters who fill the streets outside each of his hearings. The charges have not prevented his supporters from nominating him for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
His defense lawyers will argue, among other things, that British authorities should not approve an extradition request filed by their Swedish counterparts last December because he might face "illegal rendition" from Sweden to the United States, according to a 35-page document they released before the hearing. He could, they will argue, be imprisoned at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility or even subject to the death penalty. Though officials from the United States Department of Justice have subpoenaed the Twitter accounts of five people, including Mr. Assange, connected with WikiLeaks, no new information about a possible United States prosecution has emerged this year.
But close friends of Mr. Assange, who did not want to be identified, have said in recent weeks that the fear of extreme measures by the United States is a strong motivator in his decision to fight the accusations so vigorously -- he has said he will appeal to Britain's highest courts, and even to the pan-European tribunals, if the decision in the extradition hearing goes against him.
Mr. Assange has not yet been charged with any crime -- he is sought for questioning to establish whether a full prosecution will continue. Even if proved, the accusations refer to relatively minor offenses under a complex Swedish legal system that provides for several levels of sexual crimes. The most serious charge, that of rape, carries no minimum sentence and a maximum of four years' imprisonment.
The case centers on a period last August when, shortly after releasing 77,000 secret American documents from the war in Afghanistan, Mr. Assange flew to Stockholm to give a speech. There, according to legal documents and testimony given in previous hearings, he had sexual relations with two WikiLeaks volunteers referred to in British courts only as Ms. A and Ms. W. According to the documents and to Swedish friends, Ms. A is a left-wing activist in her early 30s. Ms. W, in her mid-20s, is a sometimes-artist who occasionally works in one of Stockholm's museums. Both, friends have said, were strong WikiLeaks supporters.
Their accounts, which form the basis of the extradition case, state that their encounters with him began consensually, but became nonconsensual when he persisted in having unprotected sex with them in defiance of their insistence that he use a condom.
WikiLeaks has also begun publishing documents from a trove of some 250,000 cables between American embassies and the State Department in Washington. Since Mr. Assange was freed on bail in mid-December, some of those documents relating to Middle Eastern corruption have assumed a higher profile, fueling the anger that led to the overthrow of Tunisia's strongman, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, in mid-January and cited in accounts on Monday of the intersection of money, politics and power in Egypt, where an uprising is now in its third week.
Beyond his denials, Mr. Assange has refused to address the women's claims, or those of the Swedish prosecutors, directly, telling Swedish police in an interview on Aug. 30 only that the accounts were "incredible lies," and shunning journalists who have persisted in raising the issue.
But in interviews, his defense lawyers have dismissed the charges and suggested that undue political influence led to the case being reopened after it was initially quashed. Mark Stephens, Mr. Assange's lead lawyer in London, has repeatedly said, without providing details, that "a senior political figure" was behind the move.
The reference appears to have been to Claes Borgstrom, the lawyer for Ms. A and Ms. W, who is Sweden's former equal opportunities ombudsman, and the spokesman on gender equality issues for the Social Democratic Party, the main opposition group in the Swedish Parliament.
In an interview in Stockholm last year, Mr. Borgstrom, 66, told The New York Times that, by presenting the allegations against him as part of a political conspiracy, Mr. Assange had made "victims" of the two women, who now faced vilification on the Internet and regular death threats. "There are three persons who know for a fact that this has nothing to do with WikiLeaks, the C.I.A. or the Obama administration, and they are Julian Assange and my two clients," he said.