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Success for a French baker on hunger strike and his trainees: The 18-year-old baker's apprentice from Guinea is allowed to stay in France.
"In view of his exemplary integration achievements and his prospects for a professional integration (...) the prefect of Haute-Saône decided to lift the measure taken against him and to grant him a residence permit", the prefecture announced on Thursday.
The man from West Africa came to France as an unaccompanied minor refugee and has been working in Stéphane Ravacley's bakery in Besançon since 2019.
After reaching the age of majority, the apprentice had applied for a residence permit.
This was rejected, he received an exit notification in December and appealed against it.
His boss, baker Ravacley, went on a hunger strike in early January.
"I am currently fighting for the boy to stay in France and get French papers," he told the online magazine "Brut".
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Most recently, Ravacley had to go to the hospital with a dizzy spell after eating only clear broth for days.
Nevertheless, he wanted to continue the "fight" to the end - now he has won.
"The elements originally submitted to justify his application were not sufficient to approve his application," said the prefecture about the application for a residence permit.
The man has now presented new information that has changed the assessment of the authority.
According to media reports, the prefecture originally believed that the man's identification documents were not authentic.
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Celebrities such as actress Marion Cotillard (“La vie en rose”), ex-Environment Minister Nicolas Hulot and actor Omar Sy (“Pretty best friends”) had campaigned for the apprentice.
An open letter to President Emmanuel Macron said: "You cannot remain insensitive to the fact that a French citizen is putting his or her health at risk to defend the humanistic principles - freedom, equality, fraternity." -Petition, which had been signed more than 240,000 times by Thursday, had been launched.