‘Breach of children’s rights!’ Anger as French hard-wing mayor bans pork-free school meals

Critics said that the decision to stop serving substitute meals “stigmatised” Muslims, and that the mayor could not hide behind the country’s secular laws.

Julien Sanchez, the mayor of the southern French town of Beaucaire, announced shortly before the Christmas break schools would stop serving substitute meals on the first day of the new school term, sparking outrage among Muslim and Jewish parents.

Mr Sanchez, told a local daily when announcing the new menu policy last month, said: “Pork-free substitution meals are anti-Republican.” 

The change came into effect on Monday and affects some 150 – mainly Muslim – pupils out of 600 local students in total.

School cafeterias will serve pork on Mondays to give parents the weekend to prepare an alternative meal, Mr Sanchez said.

Parents opposed to the mayor’s decision have called for protests outside the Beaucaire town hall next Monday.

Laure Cordelet, the head of a local opposition group, said that the mayor’s move “breached children’s rights” and “stigmatised the local Maghreb [north African] community”. 

The decision, she added, “can in no way be justified in the name of secularism”. 

Mr Sanchez, for his part, told France Info radio on Tuesday that he was “not an Islamophobe”.

He said: “If you defend the values of the Republic and fight against communitarianism you’re branded an Islamophobe, which I am not. I’m not scared of anyone but I’m also not looking to stigmatise anyone.

“What’s wrong with pork? If it was a medical issue then I could understand, but the issue we’re dealing with here is religious, not medical… And religion has no place in schools.”

Mr Sanchez, a member of the right-wing Front National party, is not the first French mayor to scrap pork-free meals. 

In 2015, Gilles Platret, the right-wing mayor of Chalon-sur-Saône, a town located south of Dijon, announced that local schools would no longer be serving substitute meals.

The move, however, was blocked by Dijon’s administrative court in August 2017, after judges ruled that it went “against the interests of children”.