The "gay cake" case will end on Monday morning with the final judgement from the Royal Courts of Justice in Belfast expected around 10am.
Ashers Bakery Company refused to bake a cake with the slogan "support gay marriage" for Gareth Lee because it went against their Christian beliefs. They were found to have broken discrimination laws in 2014 but appealed the ruling.
The Equality Commission for Northern Ireland (ECNI) bought the case against the Belfast-based company and argued the company's actions violated equality laws in Northern Ireland and alleged discrimination under two anti-discrimination statutes. Finding Ashers guilty in May last year, Judge Isobel Brownlie said: "The defendants are not a religious organisation. They conduct a business for profit. I believe the defendants did have the knowledge that the plaintiff was gay.
"As much as I acknowledge their religious beliefs this is a business to provide service to all. The law says they must do that."
In a dramatic session at Northern Ireland's court of appeal the Attorey General John Larkin QC intervened and said if the initial County Court ruling against Ashers was right, the laws used against the bakery fall foul of Northern Ireland's constitutional law.
Larkin said: "Although the case for the Plaintiff is put pleasantly and with every appearance of sweet reasonableness, what cannot be disguised is that the Defendants are being compelled, on pain of civil liability, to burn a pinch of incense at the altar of a god they do not worship. The constitutional law of Northern Ireland, supplemented by the ECHR, resists such a compulsion."
The case was adjourned and will return to court today for the final ruling.
It has become a totemic case with the balancing of different rights, with one side arguing for freedom to express a religious belief and the other for freedom from discrimination.
The judgement comes as a poll found 86 per cent of evangelicals in the UK support a business' right to refuse to print a message with which it doesn't agree. In a poll for the Evangelical Alliance found only five per cent disagreed a "business should have the right to refuse to print, publish (or write in icing on a cake) a message with which it does not agree".
