"Instituted for Europe by way of the Geneva Convention in 1951 and expanded to encompass the whole world in 1967, the international refugee regime was originally grounded in a narrow construction of the notion of refugee as a person outside his or her country and deprived of protection from the State of origin because of reasonable fear of persecution. Among the western liberal democracies, in practice, refugee status was attributed mostly to persons originating in Communist countries. Although "persecution" is still the prevailing core of the refugee regime at both the national and international levels, in recent years a number of international lawyers, notably James Hathaway, have argued that the status of "refugee" should be grounded in the more expansive concept of "deprivation of human rights," as operationalized in existing legal instruments."