The police crackdown on protesters in Iran was cited as evidence of the deteriorating rights situation there.

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RFE: The U.S. State Department says in its annual human rights report that many governments worldwide continued to perpetrate grave rights violations.

The State Department highlighted three major trends which defined violations of human rights in 2009, the first of which is “an alarming number of reports of torture, extrajudicial killings, and other violations of universal human rights.”

The second trend, the report said, was that in many countries, governments applied “new and often draconian restrictions” on NGOs. U.S. Assistant Secretary of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Michael Posner told journalists in Washington today that since 2008, 25 countries have further limited the ability of NGOs to register, operate freely, or receive foreign funding.

The report states that Iran’s poor human rights record only got worse during 2009.

It points to the June 12 presidential election, in which the government says President Mahmud Ahmadinejad was re-elected in spite of the doubts of many Iranians.

Iran’s “already poor human right situation rapidly deteriorated after the June elections,” Posner said. “At least 45 people were killed in clashes. Thousands were arrested. Another thousand were arrested in demonstrations in December. It is a place where we are continuing to see severe repression of dissent and are continuing to pay great attention.”

Aside from the election, the report says prison conditions in Iran often were unacceptable, and that prisoners often were held in solitary confinement and otherwise abused.

The government also waged a crackdown against advocates for the rights of women, ethnic minorities, student activists, and religious minorities, the report says, and severely restricted its citizens’ privacy and access to a free news media.