; (3) Maryna Zolatava, chief editor of the independent news website Tut.by, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison on charges of incitement to hatred and distributing materials calling for actions aimed at harming national security in March 2023; (4) Andrey Kuznechyk, a journalist who, while working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was detained in November 2021 and sentenced in June 2022 to 6 years in prison on charges of forming an extremist group; and (5) the labeling of dozens of media outlets and the exiled Belarusian Association of Journalists as extremist , and any individual charged with creating or participating in a group that has been labeled extremist faces up to 10 years in prison; Whereas Iran continues to severely restrict freedoms of the press and speech, subjecting journalists to aggressive intimidation, arbitrary summons, arrests, travel bans, conditional releases, torture, inhumane treatment, and unsubstantiated and unjust sentences, with the situation severely worsening since the start of the 2022 protests following 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody on September 16; Whereas Iran was the world’s leading jailer of journalists and the biggest jailer of female journalists according to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ December 2022 prison census, with the arrests of at least 100 journalists in Iran in the last 4 months of 2022 documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists, including— (1) female journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi, who were imprisoned in September 2022 after breaking the story of Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody, and the 2 journalists face antistate charges, including espionage, that can be punishable with execution