Once again, the spotlight is on Saudi Arabia for all the wrong reasons. This time, the kingdom is attracting criticism for condemning a self-styled psychic to death on the vague charge of "witchcraft".

Ali Sibat, who is Lebanese, was arrested by Saudi Arabia's notorious moral police at his hotel room in Medina on May 7 last year, while in town for a pilgrimage. After languishing in jail for a year and a half, he was sentenced to death in November for reportedly practising witchcraft. His lawyer has said Sibat was told that if he confessed to witchcraft, he would be released and allowed to return home.

Sibat was known for his appearances on a Lebanese satellite television station, where he offered callers advice and predictions about the future. Human rights organisations and media reports allege that these TV appearances were the only evidence used to condemn Sibat to death. This is a point worth emphasising: Sibat didn't kill, torture, terrorise or kidnap anyone, or commit any crime that put anybody else's life at risk. He told the superstitious whether they would find happiness or have children, and as a result, he has been condemned to death.

Such an extraordinarily harsh sentence highlights the kingdom's ferocious and disturbing thirst for executions (in some cases even having the decapitated heads sewn back on for the public to gawp at). Saudi Arabia put to death 102 individuals in 2008, the third-highest rate in the world.

Saudi Arabia continues to favour capital punishment even as the international community increasingly turns its back on the practice. In December 2008, the UN general assembly overwhelmingly voted to adopt a second resolution calling for a moratorium on use of the death penalty, with a view to eventual complete abolition. Today, 138 states have either abolished or imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, and that number is expected to grow.

What's particularly horrifying is the way in which Saudi Arabia decides whom to march off to be executed. According to Amnesty International, prisoners there are often sentenced in unfair and secret trials. Defendants, especially if they are migrant workers from outside the Arab world, are often not provided with defence lawyers or interpreters. Investigations have also shown that foreign prisoners, their families and embassies are not properly informed about their sentencing. Moreover, Saudi Arabia has executed, and continues to execute children or individuals who committed crimes while under the age of 18, in flagrant disregard for the convention on the rights of the child to which Riyadh is a signatory.

Astonishingly, Saudi Arabia also has no written penal code, meaning that those who live in or visit the kingdom have no way of knowing whether or not their actions constitute criminal activity. Accordingly, judges have the power to determine what behaviour is unlawful and to bestow on prisoners any punishment they see fit, including the death penalty.

Since word of Sibat's sentencing emerged, newspapers in the Middle East have been running photographs of his family. One photo is particularly poignant: Sibat's young daughter sits at home in rural Lebanon, smiling innocently next to a framed picture of her father. She probably has no idea what the Saudi "justice" system has in store for him.

Ali Sibat's death sentence makes a mockery of Saudi Arabia's judiciary and underscores the need for a worldwide halt to capital punishment. No state should deprive a person of their right to life, especially for something as nebulous as witchcraft. The Lebanese government, which itself has introduced a moratorium on capital punishment, should stand up to Riyadh and demand that Sibat's senseless sentence be overturned.

• Elaheh Khayyat is the pen name of a Lebanon-based journalist and human rights activist.