; Whereas violations of press freedom are persistent in South Asia and Southeast Asia, where— (1) in Vietnam, Pham Doan Trang, a journalist and writer, following a year in pretrial detention, was sentenced to 9 years in prison in December 2021 for anti-state propaganda in a judicial proceeding and imprisonment declared arbitrary by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; (2) in Bangladesh, journalists are subjected to arbitrary arrests, and suffer killings and physical attacks with near-total impunity; and (3) in Sri Lanka, the enactment of the recent draconian Online Safety Act, which undermines freedom of speech, incentivizes self-censorship and could be misused to suppress dissent; Whereas Cuba remains a highly restricted environment for independent media, marked by internet restrictions and constant, state-directed harassment of journalists and news outlets, as well as the preponderance of arbitrary arrests, threats, police summonses, and forced exile, which remain among the repressive suite of measures applied by the Government against activists and journalists, with victims including Lazaro Yuri Valle Roca, a journalist who was sentenced to 5 years in prison for enemy propaganda and resistance in July 2022, evidence that the Cuban Government continues to employ retaliatory tactics to silence and jail journalists, or force them into exile, to maintain its oppressive censorship regime