Claim: The Australian government has banned 50 military generals from Pakistan.
Fact: The Australian parliament has not decided to ban Pakistani military generals from entering the country.
On 5 June 2023, a Twitter user shared a video claiming that the Australian government has banned 50 military Generals from the Pakistan Army for being involved in human rights violations against the supporters of Imran Khan.
This tweet was captioned:
آسٹریلیا نے پاکستانی جرنیلوں کو اپنے ملک مین بین کر دیا
[Translation: Australia has banned Pakistani generals from its country]
In 2020, the Pakistan military sentenced a Pakistani-Australian civilian Hasan Askree, the son of a former two-star general, to 5 years imprisonment for writing a critical letter to the then COAS, Qamar Javed Bajwa. He had come back to Pakistan to care for his ailing mother in 2015.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check found that originally this claim was shared on Twitter by a retired army officer, Adil Raja, in March 2023. He claimed that the Australian parliament has taken up the case to ban the entry of the officers of the Pakistan Army and ISI who were allegedly directly involved in the inciting the 9 May riots and protests, and he claimed that the source of this information was Pakistani-Australians who have spearheaded this action.
We searched the words “Pakistan”, “army”, “general”, and “ban” in different formations on the official website of the Australian parliament and found several search results, none of them containing any notice of a discussion within the parliament with regards to banning a list of Pakistani army generals from entry into the country. We made this search limited to May and June 2023. Most of the search results were documented parliamentary discussions on the assimilation of Afghan refugees immigrating to Australia from Pakistan.
We found a petition (No. EN4979) pertaining to the current political crisis in Pakistan from 22 May 2023. It called for a motion or declaration that free and fair elections be held in KPK and Punjab in Pakistan. Another petition (EN4942) also called for the Australian parliament to take note of the human rights violations in Pakistan and demand the Pakistani people’s right to a free and fair election.
We also got in touch with the Pakistan Consulate in Sydney, Australia to confirm whether the Australian government has taken such a step but did not receive a response from them.
Virality
The tweet received 13,166 interactions on Twitter and reached 75,268 followers. On Facebook, we found this claim shared here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
We also found that this video was extremely popular on TikTok.
Conclusion: The Australian parliament did not ban military generals from Pakistan.
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