London (AFP)

Dangerous propagator of state secrets, to be judged, or hero hunted for freedom to inform, to be protected, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange appears to be an ardent defender of controversial transparency.

Aged 48, the Australian with silver hair faces from Monday a crucial legal procedure: British justice examines the extradition request of the United States which wants to judge him for espionage.

The American justice system accuses him of having published in 2010 more than 700,000 documents on Washington's military and diplomatic activities on its Wikileaks platform. He faces up to 175 years in prison in the United States.

Calls have increased in recent months to denounce the treatment suffered by Assange, imprisoned in Belmarsh prison, south-east London.

His conditions of detention were denounced by the UN rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer as a "inhuman situation", which would put his life "in danger". A group of doctors equated the treatment reserved for him with "psychological torture".

It is in this high-security prison establishment that he has been imprisoned since he was extracted from the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where he had taken refuge, disguised as a courier, on June 19, 2012, then sued for rape in Sweden, since abandoned.

His image as a "cyber-warrior" has blurred over the years, in particular with the dissemination by his platform, in 2016, at a key moment of the American presidential campaign, of thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic Party and from Hillary Clinton's team, who helped weaken the candidate.

These revelations then aroused strong praise from candidate Donald Trump. "I love WikiLeaks," he said during a meeting. According to the CIA, these documents were obtained by Wikileaks from Russian agents, which the platform denies.

This episode fueled suspicions of collusion with Russia by an Assange whose revelations are often made at the expense of the United States, and who collaborated with the television channel RT, close to the Kremlin.

- "The most dangerous in the world" -

The Australian started life by being tossed from right to left by his mother, Christine Ann Assange, a theater artist who had separated from his father even before his birth.

He compares his childhood to that of Tom Sawyer, between building rafts and various explorations of his environment. Until the age of 15, he lived in over 30 Australian cities and attended many schools before settling in Melbourne where he studied mathematics, physics and computer science.

Gifted, hard-working, he was caught up in the hacker community and began to hack NASA or the Pentagon websites using the pseudonym "Mendax".

It was at this time that he had a son, Daniel, whose custody he contested with the mother. When he launched WikiLeaks with the aim of "freeing the press" and "unmasking secrets and abuses of state", he became, according to one of his biographers, "the most dangerous man in the world".

He made himself known to the general public in 2010 with the publication of hundreds of thousands of American documents. A blow of radiance which is worth to this tall and thin man with a diaphanous complexion to be presented as a champion of the freedom to inform.

But at the same time as his notoriety grows, the critics accumulate.

In 2011, the five newspapers (including The New York Times, The Guardian and Le Monde) associated with WikiLeaks condemned the platform method, which made unexpurgated telegrams from the United States State Department public. They believe the documents are likely to "endanger certain sources". The criticism will also be made by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Charged with writing the autobiography of Julian Assange, Andrew O'Hagan ended up throwing in the towel with this final verdict: "The man who prides himself on revealing the secrets of this world cannot bear to reveal his own."

But a hard core remained loyal to him, like the American actress Pamela Anderson, or the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood.

© 2020 AFP