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 vocally 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.