I think it's a good idea. Certainly it's a problem which hasn't been addressed in Armagetron Advanced (to more dire effect in public fortress games, etc.) and you get similar effects in Teewars, particularly in CTF mode.
The mentality of the average winning team is that if they see that there's only one player on the other team, they will even up the teams, but if there are some AFKs on there, they won't bother in case they come back (which they sometimes do and sometimes don't), lasting until the match ends. At best, this is frustrating for the alive player on the winning team, and at worst they leave, everyone else gets bored and everyone leaves the server in search of somewhere else. And we all know that apart from those magic people who will join an empty server, players will only join a server with people in it, even if it's worse geographically.
Perhaps I'm extrapolating a bit, but apart from a tournament, as previously discussed, which should be played on a server running tournament rules, there is no good reason why a tee which has been inactive for > ~20s should need to remain in the game.
As for fixing the problem -- clicking to respawn (as suggested mentioned by ShootMe) is the best solution in my opinion. You will note that up to and including 0.3.4, the respawn time is significantly faster if you click through the score screen than if you wait, so any player who's playing hard will be clicking repeatedly after they die anyway. This is also consistent with other games (UT) and perhaps requires a simple "click to respawn" message to guide the new players.
I also can't see why it would be advantageous for a player to go AFK in a tournament with more than two players. To cover the two player possibility I suppose a server configuration option would in fact be necessary.
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