Julian Assange will make his final appeal to a High Court judge on Tuesday against his extradition to the United States to face espionage charges relating to the release of secret US military documents.
The WikiLeaks founder is viewed by US prosecutors and Western security officials as a reckless and dangerous enemy of the state whose actions placed agents named in the material at risk.
Supporters regard him as an anti-establishment hero who has been victimised for exposing US wrongdoing in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and say his prosecution is an assault on both journalism and free speech.
His legal team argue that his extradition to the US is political and that he could be subject to torture or degrading treatment once there.
But what exactly is the case against him?
Who is Julian Assange and what is WikiLeaks?
Julian Assange, 52, is the founder of WikiLeaks, a non-profit organisation set up in 2006 to publish classified information from anonymous sources. It claims to be a platform for whistleblowers and to have published more than 10 million files.
Assange became a skilled hacker during his teenage years and by 1996 - aged 25 - he had pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking and related crimes in Australia, being fined $2,100.
Assange has described WikiLeaks as “a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents”.