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It was in that context that the Giudice di pace di Mercato San Severino decided to stay the proceedings and to refer the following questions to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling: ‘Do Articles 6 and 13 of the [European] Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union …, Directive 2008/52/EC …, the general European Union law principle of effective judicial protection and, in general, European Union law as a whole preclude the introduction in a Member State of the European Union of a set of rules [such as] Legislative Decree No 28/2010 and Ministerial Decree No 180/2010 … which provide that: 1. a court hearing subsequent legal proceedings may infer evidence against a party who, without valid reason, has failed to participate in compulsory mediation; 2. where legal proceedings brought after the rejection of a conciliation proposal are concluded by a judgment in precisely the same terms as those of the rejected proposal, the court must disallow recovery of the costs sustained by a successful party who rejected the conciliation proposal in respect of the period following the making of the proposal and must order that party to pay the costs of the unsuccessful party in respect of the same period and to make a further payment to the State treasury in the same amount as that already paid in respect of fees (single payment); 3. where there are serious and exceptional reasons, a court may disallow recovery of the costs incurred by the successful party in respect of the remuneration paid to the mediator and the fees of any expert, even where the judgment concluding legal proceedings is not in exactly the same terms as those of the conciliation proposal; 4. the court must order any party who has failed without valid reason to participate in mediation to pay to the State treasury a sum equal to the single payment in respect of the proceedings; 5. the mediator may, or must, make a proposal for conciliation even in the absence of any agreement between the parties and even where the parties fail to participate in mediation; 6. the period within which the attempt at mediation must be completed may be up to four months; 7. an action may be proceeded with, even after expiry of the period of four months from the commencement of the mediation procedure, only after a report confirming that no agreement has been reached has been obtained from the secretariat of the mediation body concerned, drafted by the mediator and setting out the proposal that has been rejected; 8. there may be more than one attempt at mediation – and the period allowed for resolving the dispute will be multiplied accordingly – whenever a new application is legitimately made in the course of legal proceedings that have, in the meantime, been instituted; 9. the costs of compulsory mediation are at least twice those of the legal proceedings that mediation is designed to avoid, a disparity which increases exponentially as the amount involved in the case increases (to such an extent that the costs of mediation may reach more than six times those of legal proceedings) and the complexity of the case increases (such as to require the appointment of an expert, paid by the parties to the mediation, to assist the mediator in disputes that call for specific technical knowledge, even though any technical report prepared by the expert [or] the information he has obtained may not be used in any subsequent legal proceedings)?’