for those who are curious,
this seems to be the reply from protonmail on reddit[0]
>Hi everyone, Proton team here. We are also deeply concerned about this case. In the interest of transparency, here's some more context.
In this case, Proton received a legally binding order from the Swiss Federal Department of Justice which we are obligated to comply with. Details about how we handle Swiss law enforcement requests can found in our transparency report:
https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/
Transparency with the user community is extremely important to us and we have been publishing a transparency report since 2015.
As detailed in our transparency report, our published threat model, and also our privacy policy, under Swiss law, Proton can be forced to collect info on accounts belonging to users under Swiss criminal investigation. This is obviously not done by default, but only if Proton gets a legal order for a specific account. Under no circumstances however, can our encryption be bypassed.
Our legal team does in fact screen all requests that we receive but in this case, it appears that an act contrary to Swiss law did in fact take place (and this was also the determination of the Federal Department of Justice which does a legal review of each case). This means we did not have grounds to refuse the request. Thus Swiss law gives us no possibility to appeal this particular request.
The prosecution in this case seems quite aggressive. Unfortunately, this is a pattern we have increasingly seen in recent years around the world (for example in France where terror laws are inappropriately used). We will continue to campaign against such laws and abuses.
to me this seems like they did all the could in regards to handling this request.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/pil6xi/climate_...