France has deported an Algerian Deliveroo rider who was convicted of anti-Semitic discrimination for refusing to transport orders of kosher food to Jewish customers.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said the courier, who was illegally living in France, was ‘expelled from the country’ on Saturday after serving his four-month prison sentence.
Strasbourg Criminal Court convicted the Deliveroo rider, identified as 19-year-old Dhia Edine D. by local media, in January for refusing to deliver food made by a kosher restaurant in Strasbourg to Jewish clients.
The restaurant’s owner had filed a complaint with police for discrimination after the driver refused to handle their food. Following his arrest, the courier was found to have been living illegally in France.
France has deported an Algerian Deliveroo rider who was convicted of anti-Semitic discrimination for refusing to transport orders of kosher food to Jewish customers (stock image)
‘As I promised, the delivery man who said he did not want to serve Jewish customers was expelled from the country today, after having served his prison sentence,’ Mr Darmanin said on Saturday.
‘Anti-Semitic hatred has no place in France.’
At the time of the restaurant owner’s complaint in January, a regional Jewish institution, the Israelite Consistory of the Bas-Rhin region, said another kosher restaurant had reported that drivers working for Deliveroo were not delivering to Jewish customers.
The consistory said the group and restaurants had filed a legal complaint, denouncing what it called ‘openly anti-Semitic discrimination’. Only one deliverer – Dhia Edine D. – was involved in the court action.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin (pictured) said the courier, who was illegally living in France, was ‘expelled from the country’ on Saturday after serving his four-month prison sentence
Mr Darmanin said at the time the Algerian courier would be deported after he completed his prison sentence.
‘I decided to expel from the national territory the food ‘deliverer’…who said he did not want to handle deliveries to Jewish clients,’ Darmanin wrote.
The Strasbourg prosecutor’s office had opened an investigation into ‘discrimination based on ethnic origin in the framework of providing a service,’ according to a prosecutor’s aide.
Deliveroo spokesman Damien Steffan told local broadcaster France Bleu in January that the company thinks ‘anti-Semitic acts, like all racist or discriminatory acts of all kinds, are unacceptable.’
Deliveroo has around 14,000 drivers in France and has seen business grow considerably during the coronavirus pandemic.
The case drew the national government’s attention amid long-running efforts to fight anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination.
France’s minister for citizenship issues, Marlene Schiappa, met in January with the management of Deliveroo France.