A Catholic Nobel Peace Prize winner who was unexpectedly freed from jail in Belarus has paid tribute to supporters who helped secure his release, while warning that over a thousand political prisoners still languish in his country’s penal colonies.

“Psychologically, it still feels as if part of me is in prison — I’m left with a sense of unreality,” said Ales Bialiatski, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2022, while in detention, for helping “demonstrate the significance of civil society for peace and democracy.”

“Although my faith is a personal matter, it constantly sustained me, giving me confidence that I’d be free some day when this harsh time of trial came to an end. I was supposed to stay in jail for another five years, yet now I’m free. This is truly a miracle from God.”

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The lay Catholic spoke with OSV News after being released Dec. 13 with 122 other political prisoners and deported to neighbouring Lithuania by the regime of Alexander Lukashenko. He said he had been “threatened, intimidated and tormented” right up to being “taken to the border and thrown out.” 

“Just a few days ago, I was sitting alongside people who’d been locked up for 10 or 20 years for murder and very serious crimes — political prisoners like myself were under special surveillance and had to be constantly wary of provocations and punishments,” said Bialiatski, who founded a Belarusian Catholic Assembly and the country’s first post-communist Catholic magazine.

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“Coming here, where people are living freely, has been like beginning a warm, sunny day after being wrapped in a frozen shroud. I no longer need to be afraid, and it’s been a huge happiness to be with my wife and family, whom I haven’t seen for more than three years.”

Bialiatski, 63, directed Belarus’s Viasna Human Rights Center until its supreme court de-legalisation in 2003, and was given a 10-year penal colony sentence in March 2023 for “smuggling” and “financing of group actions grossly violating public order,” in a move condemned by United Nations experts as a “targeted use of criminal persecution.”

He was released — blindfolded and without prior warning — from Penal Colony No. 9 on Dec. 13, in exchange for the lifting of U.S. sanctions on the potash sector, crucial for Belarus’s economy.

He said that there had been other Church members in his prison and penal colony, particularly from western Belarus, but said Catholics had been unable to pray together or receive visits from priests.

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Bialiatski’s release follows the Nov. 20 freeing of Fr. Henrykh Akalatovich, an elderly parish rector from Valozyn, who began 11 years in a strict-regime penal colony in April for “high treason,” as well as that of Oblate of Mary Immaculate Fr. Andrzej Juchniewicz, chairman of Belarus’s Major Superiors, Delegates and Representatives of Institutes and Societies of Apostolic Life, who was handed 13 years in April after a closed trial for alleged to “criminal offenses.”

Both priests were freed following a Minsk visit by Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Eastern Churches, and a former nuncio to Belarus, and are currently at the Vatican, where they have not spoken publicly.