Julian Assange is fighting an attempt by the United States

Julian Assange is fighting an attempt by the United States to extradite him to face charges on what it says was "one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States".

t marks the culmination of a nearly decade-long pursuit by US authorities of the Australian-born WikiLeaks founder over the publication of secret documents and files in 2010 and 2011.

Assange's extradition hearing had initially begun in February but was delayed for several months, and the coronavirus pandemic added additional delays, meaning Assange has been kept on remand in Belmarsh prison in south-east London since last September.

As reported by Background Briefing, Assange's defence team will attempt to persuade the court he is unfit to travel to the US to face trial, and that the attempt to send him there is essentially an abuse of process.

How did he get to this point?

WikiLeaks made international headlines in April 2010 when it published a classified US military video showing an Apache attack helicopter gunning down 11 civilians, including two Reuters journalists, on a street in Baghdad in 2007.

Collateral murder video released by WikiLeaks

The video WikiLeaks dubbed 'Collateral Murder' showed a US helicopter shooting at civilians in Iraq.(Youtube: Sunshinepress)

Later that year, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of US military messages and cables, a leak that saw former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning jailed.

In August 2010, Sweden issued an arrest warrant for Assange on allegations of rape and molestations, and in December he was arrested in London and subsequently bailed.

In May 2012, the UK's Supreme Court ruled Assange should be extradited to Sweden to face questioning but the following month he entered Ecuador's embassy in London and was granted asylum.

Assange, 49, has always denied the allegations, saying they were part of a US plot to discredit him and eventually extradite him to the US, and the investigation was eventually dropped in 2017.

He remained holed up in the embassy for seven years until April 2019, when the Ecuadorian government withdrew his asylum and Metropolitan Police officers arrested him for failing to surrender to the court over an arrest warrant issued in 2012.