Corrupting, Destroying Or Concealing An Official Document
Article 205 and Article 208 of the TPC penalizes the acts of corrupting, destroying or concealing “a real official document” and “a real private document”, respectively.
By distorting, destroying or concealing an official or private document, an existing evidence is eliminated and it covers the deprivation of a means that proves public trust.
The material subject of the relevant offense is official or private documents. On the other hand, these documents must be legally valid and real documents, and the corruption, destruction or concealment of a forged document does not constitute these crimes. In this case, only if the conditions are met, the offense under Article 281 may be committed. Likewise, if the altered part of a real document is corrupted, the relevant offense does not occur.
The material element of this offense consists of corrupting, destroying or concealing the documents specified in Articles 205 and 208, i.e. making the document unusable for evidentiary purposes. Corruption, in the sense of the article, refers to the falsification of a writing in such a way that it can no longer be accepted as a document. A concrete example of this is when the writing is scribbled in such a way that it becomes unreadable.
The act of destroying is to eliminate a document in terms of its material existence. Tearing a handwritten will can be given as an example.
The act of concealment, on the other hand, refers to eliminating the material existence of the document without destroying it. Thus, the use of the document is rendered impossible.
If the corrupted, destroyed or concealed document is completely under the control of the perpetrator, the act cannot be considered unlawful. In cases where the person is obliged to present or return the document in his/her possession, there is no such power of disposal.
The consent of those who have an interest in the preservation of the private document eliminates the illegality of the act.
These crimes are completed when the person who has the right to dispose of the document is deprived of the possibility of disposition, that is, when it is not possible to benefit from the document. Therefore, it is possible to attempt this crime.
The moral element of these crimes is intent, and for the existence of intent, in addition to the will to corrupt, destroy or conceal the document, the will to destroy evidence is also required. This second condition is accepted in order to distinguish these crimes from the offense of damaging property. However, if the perpetrator only acts with the intention of damaging something belonging to someone else, the related crime does not occur, but the crime of property damage occurs.
In the presence of related offenses, the perpetrator cannot also be held responsible for the offense of damaging someone else’s property. The acts such as destroying, destroying, destroying which give the crime its characteristic are also in question in the crimes in Articles 205 and 208. On the other hand, if the destroyed or corrupted document was obtained as a result of theft, the perpetrator should be held responsible for both crimes.
On the other hand, the Law regulates the fact that the perpetrator is a public official as an aggravating factor for the crime of corrupting, destroying or concealing an official document.