London court will rule on Wednesday whether Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, will be extradited to Sweden over allegations of sexual abuse there last year. The decision may mark the end of a months-long legal battle that has seen Mr. Assange under house arrest and WikiLeaks temporarily shuttered. A British judge had previously ruled that Mr. Assange should return to Sweden to face allegations of sexual molestation, unlawful coercion and rape, made by two WikiLeaks volunteers in Stockholm in August 2010. Wednesday’s ruling comes after an appeal by Mr. Assange, who denies the allegations and has engaged a series of high-profile lawyers to fight the extradition warrants. He also may be allowed to appeal to Britain’s supreme court following Wednesday’s decision, court officials said.
WikiLeaks’ release of hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and classified State Department diplomatic cables dominated the front pages of newspapers across the world, including The New York Times, last year. Mr. Assange placed himself at the forefront of those releases, he told reporters, as a means of seeking publicity for documents he hoped would reshape the very nature of government.
But since Mr. Assange was briefly jailed last December, before being released on bail and placed under house arrest at the country mansion of a wealthy friend in eastern England, WikiLeaks has foundered. He told a press conference in London last month that it would cease its publishing activities because it lacked money following a blockade on donations to WikiLeaks by credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard, and the payments services Western Union and PayPal.
In the midst of Mr. Assange’s legal battles, the organization, insiders have said, was severely weakened by a spate of defections from its core of specialist computer-programmer volunteers. Many, tired of what they described as Mr. Assange’s eccentricity and imperiousness, have formed their own document leaking sites.
As his legal battles have spanned half a dozen court appearances, across three courthouses, Mr. Assange has given dozens of interviews with the rolling country estate as a backdrop. He has condemned Sweden’s strict sexual crimes laws, calling the country “the Saudi Arabia of feminism” and compared himself with the black civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. He has told friends that he refused to return to Stockholm to face questioning because he fears that the country is run by a small cabal of interconnected people, who are aligned against him. He feels he is on trial, he has said, for an alleged affront to all Swedish women, and that court proceedings will thus be tainted. The two women accusers said that consensual encounters with Mr. Assange became nonconsensual. Mr. Assange appeared for an initial interview with police in Sweden in 2010, but fled to London before further questioning could be completed, a court here was subsequently told. Swedish prosecutors decided to issue an Interpol red notice and a European arrest warrant to compel him to return. Protesters, and celebrity supporters like the socialites Jemima Khan and Bianca Jagger, and the journalist John Pilger, have often conflated the case with a battle for free speech. Mr. Assange himself has hinted darkly that government forces might be behind the allegations of sexual wrongdoing as a means of silencing him.
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