Story highlights Nikki Haley: Widespread human rights violations a warning sign that breakdown in security is coming

Syrian war just one example of how such violations can spiral into all-out war, she says

Ambassador Nikki R. Haley is the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations and a member of President Donald Trump's Cabinet. The views expressed are her own.

(CNN) Imagine you are the parent of a boy -- a teenager. Policemen come to your home in the middle of the night and take your boy away. He is held without explanation for weeks. And when he finally comes home, your boy has all the marks of having been tortured. Bruises from being beaten. Red, open wounds from being burned. Then you look at his hands and the worst is confirmed. Where his fingernails once were, there are only raw, bloody, exposed nerves. Grown men with pliers, he tells you, ripped his fingernails off in prison.

For a group of parents in Syria in 2011, this was not an exercise in imagination but a horrifying reality. Their boys were arrested and tortured for the crime of writing anti-government graffiti on the wall of a school. When the parents marched in protest to demand their children's release, security services opened fire on them. When more people came out to protest the killings, the government fired on them again. Soon, the point of no return was reached.

Nikki Haley

"We were asking in a peaceful way to release the children but their reply was bullets," a relative of one of the boys told a reporter . "Now we can have no compromise with any security branches."

The Syrian war is just one example of how human rights violations can become a vicious cycle of violence and instability that quickly spirals into all-out war. What began as an act of free expression of the kind Americans take for granted has become a conflict responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of desperate refugees. Nations thousands of miles away have been impacted.

As the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, I've looked at how we can do more to respond to human rights violations before they reach the level of conflict. Traditionally, the United Nations Security Council has been considered the place where peace and security are debated, not human rights. But Tuesday, at the insistence of the United States, for the first time the Security Council took up the connection between human rights and conflict. We debated how widespread human rights violations are a warning sign -- a loud, blaring siren -- that a breakdown in peace and security is coming.

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