LONDON  Lawyers for the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, said at a court hearing on Monday that they thought he would not receive a fair trial if he was extradited to Sweden to face accusations of sexual misconduct.

The hearing, scheduled to continue on Tuesday, was the culmination of an acrimonious public battle with prosecutors in Sweden who have sought since September to question Mr. Assange, 39, about accusations made against him in Stockholm last summer by two women who volunteered for WikiLeaks, one in her early 30s and another in her mid-20s. One contends that he initiated unprotected sex with her while she was asleep, the morning after she had taken him to her apartment for the night.

Mr. Assange, wearing a dark blue suit and patterned tie, sat alone in an expansive glass-walled defendant’s box, a space that has been occupied by notorious Islamic extremists during terror trials. He occasionally passed yellow notes to his extensive legal team but barely spoke, beyond complaining at one point that he could not hear one of the Swedish witnesses summoned to testify on his behalf.

The hearing was the result of the Swedish prosecutors’ action in early December in issuing a European arrest warrant for Mr. Assange, a step that led to his being jailed for nine days and then released on bail. Mr. Assange’s lead lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, told the court there would be “a real risk of a flagrant denial of justice” if the Swedish government succeeded in securing his extradition, because his case would probably be heard in closed sessions, with no reporters or other outsiders present, in keeping with Swedish policy in sex cases. In such circumstances, he said, even if Mr. Assange were to be acquitted, “the stigma would remain.”