Andrea Costantino, a 49-year-old businessman from Milan, has been imprisoned for three months in the Abu Dhabi prison “without a charge being made against him”. When he was arrested by the National Security police on March 21 last, Costantino was with his wife and three-year-old daughter in a hotel where he was staying to resume his trading activities blocked by Covid for over a year, during the which had followed them remotely. The police forces searched the hotel room and told his wife that they would take him to Abu Dhabi, where he is still being held. According to what was reported by the first embassy advisor and the ambassador who visited him twice, in three months the man was questioned only once for about ten minutes. “He’s already lost eighteen kilos.”
The family lawyer, Cinzia Fuggetti, an expert in international law, has been dealing with Constantine’s businesses for years and knows the reality of the Emirates well. In this story, however, he finds many “anomalies”. “It is not normal for their legal system for a person to be arrested without the formalization of an indictment,” he said. “The Vienna Convention requires a country to notify another if one of its citizens has been arrested. If his wife had not been with him that day, we would have known nothing not only of the reasons but also of the arrest itself and we would have been forced to look for him in hospitals. If it were a work-related arrest – he considers – after three months we would know the reason, instead we are completely in the dark ».
Perhaps, the lawyer speculates, “his story fits into the climate of tension between Italy and the United Arab Emirates” following the Italian arms embargo due to the involvement of the Arab Emirates in the war in Yemen.