Comment by rich_sasha
7 months ago
UK has the idea of contempt of court. Even as it stands, the court can demand you submit some evidence - say an encryption key for a document. And if you refuse, they can even imprison you until you surrender the key.
Another principle is that when someone is destroying evidence, you can presume it contained incriminating evidence.
I think you could make the punishment proportional to the presumed crime.
And then what's stopping the police or governments jailing people for crimes _they_ think happened?
Especially if they can claim they "presume the evidence was destroyed."