The afterlife of consent: rethinking temporality, human dignity, and structural harm in international human rights law

Contemporary international human rights law faces a conceptual challenge from digital environments in which intimate material remains accessible, reproducible, and socially consequential long after disclosure. Although scholarship addresses digital privacy, technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and platform governance, insufficient attention has been given to the temporal and relational implications of persistent exposure for consent and human dignity. This article asks whether existing international human rights frameworks adequately conceptualise harm when initial consent acquires continuing consequences through digital infrastructures. Employing qualitative doctrinal and interdisciplinary legal analysis, the study examines international human rights norms and regional jurisprudence through feminist relational autonomy, structural-harm analysis, African relational conceptions of dignity, and decolonial approaches to international law. The findings reveal unresolved tensions concerning consent, autonomy, responsibility, and remedy. The article develops the concept of the afterlife of consent to capture the divergence between initial authorisation and transformed conditions of visibility, accessibility, and vulnerability. It argues that relational dignity and structural-harm perspectives enable nuanced interpretations of continuing digital exposure, while decolonial analysis broadens the conceptualisation of the human rights subject. The study advances a framework for interpreting existing protections in response to persistent digital vulnerability without establishing an unlimited right to erasure, while preserving established human rights principles and addressing evolving digital realities.